My fond ties with the late Col. Young Ok Kim go back to 1979, when the wizened warrior would often trudge to my cramped Koreatown Weekly newsroom housed in a rusty former hostel under the shadow of the humming downtown Los Angeles expressway.

He would just sit at the office corner like a hovering mother hen and watch over the willing slaves at work. Solicitously, he would inquire about any help he could offer for the ragtag “English voice” for the second-wave newcomers from Korea. After the long day’s work, he would share with me many of his storied war exploits with a war historian’s deadpan precision.

But never would he dwell on his war wounds that would dog him for the rest of his life or his past two marriages during his 29-year military service covering two wars. Neither did I dare pry since my newsman’s antenna sensed his subconscious reluctance to “go there.”

Kim was wounded four times in Italy and Korea. The worst, according to war historian John Nakashima, was the shrapnel that punctured his ankle and severed a major nerve, requiring more than 20 operations. Thanks to a miraculous medical training experiment at UCLA, his 30-year torment seemed to fade in 1987 when he was finally free of pain. The lingering post-wartime affliction, however, may have taken its toll on his two marriages.

It took my persistent nudging of his stepson Tom Surh over the years to shed light on the untold distaff side of the Young Ok Kim legend through his long-ailing but mentally alert mother, Nora (Yoon Chung Surh) Kim, now 90 years old.

In a remarkable wartime romance, Young Ok Kim married Ida, the sister of Tom’s father, Harry Surh, shortly after World War II. She became a nurse. When she heard her newly wed husband was wounded in Italy, she joined the military as an officer serving in emergency hospitals in London. Their marriage ended shortly after the war.

Nora married Harry Surh in 1937, and they were divorced in 1953. By this time, the seriously wounded Young Ok had returned home from the Korean conflict. Nora, who had two children, Jerry and Tom, married Kim as an “Army wife” in 1955. He was forced to retire as a full colonel in 1971 due to his war wounds. Their marriage ended in 1983.

Out of Nora’s firsthand accounts emerges a rare glimpse of the subterranean multi-ethnic Chinatowns during the anti-Asian exclusionary decades where newcomers from Korea and other Asian colonies found their comfort zone in the scattered and crowded Chinese settlements across the West. Intermarriages and other symbiotic relations developed with their more established Chinese settlers.

A crossover daughter of both Korean and Chinese families in unrelenting poverty, Nora’s life in many ways is no less extraordinary than the most decorated Korean American soldier’s. Hers is but a fascinating aspect of the unseen and unheard Asian Diaspora.