None of this helped the men who had already died on the Benlomond, or on the thousands of other Allied merchant vessels that went down in the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Arctic during the wartime years. But it did mean that the merchant seamen who continued to work the supply routes after 1943 faced progressively improving odds. The war had claimed what it had claimed; the survival rate for the remaining years improved.
For Poon Lim, the end of the war in 1945 brought the closure of the Curtiss-Wright plant where he had been working and the transition to United States Lines that would define the next four decades of his career. He was twenty-seven years old in 1945. The one hundred and thirty-three days on the raft were already three years behind him. The life ahead — the citizenship, the marriage, the career, the family, the retirement — was longer than anything that had preceded it.
He carried the experience with him, as a person who had been through something extraordinary inevitably does. What it meant to him, in the everyday currency of a working life in American merchant shipping, is not something the available sources fully document. He talked about it when asked; the quote about hoping no one would break the record is preserved in multiple sources from multiple periods. He cooperated with the McCunn biography. He appears to have been, by the evidence of those who knew him, a person who had made peace with what had happened and what he had done, and who was building something rather than remaining defined by the extraordinary interlude that the war had imposed on his trajectory.