## The Book and What Survives
The primary English-language narrative account of Poon Lim’s story is Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s *Sole Survivor*, published in 1985. McCunn, a writer of Chinese-American biography and history whose other major works include *Thousand Pieces of Gold* (a biography of a Chinese woman who survived slavery in nineteenth-century Idaho) and *Wooden Fish Songs*, brought to the Poon Lim account her characteristic approach to recovering the stories of Chinese-American historical figures who had been underrepresented in mainstream narratives.
The *Sole Survivor* account drew on available testimony, records, and the memories of those who knew Poon Lim and his story. By 1985, Poon Lim was in his mid-sixties, retired, living in Brooklyn with his family. He was still alive to participate in the documentation of his own history. The book’s publication in the mid-1980s represents a moment in which the living witness and the historical researcher could still overlap — a moment that would close with Poon Lim’s death in 1991.
A 1985 Los Angeles Times review of the book acknowledged both the significance of the survival story and McCunn’s approach to telling it. The review is available in the newspaper’s archive and represents one of the few contemporary press responses to the book’s publication. The book is the most complete English-language account of Poon Lim’s life and ordeal, though it is a biography rather than a primary historical document and should be understood as a work that draws on and interprets available sources rather than generating primary evidence of its own.