By the late 1940's, Tung Pok Chin had saved enough money to once again operate his own laundry business. To secure the documents necessary to make the purchase, Chin joined the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, an organization that protected the rights of laundry workers. Chin's new laundry was located in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a primarily residential neighborhood that had few Asians.

In 1949, Chin decided to remarry. He had learned of his first wife's affair with his mother's nephew in 1945. She bore a daughter, and buried the newborn in a heap of ashes. This fact, coupled with the poor academic standing of his two sons in Hong Kong who had their minds set only on joining their father in Gold Mountain, convinced Chin to start a new family in America.

Chin returned to Hong Kong and married Mak Ting Fong in the summer of 1949. In the spring of 1950, the couple's first child, Wilson, was born one month after his parents' arrival in New York City. He was named for the ship that brought Tung Pok Chin and his new wife to America, the U.S.S. Wilson.

Two years later, Chin's daughter, Winifred, was born in Brooklyn. The Reverend Louis T. Buchheimer of True Light Lutheran Church baptized both children. The family attended Sunday services regularly at True Light, where Chin resumed his duties as Sunday school interpreter following his return from the war.

Soon after Wilson began attending public school in 1955, Ting Fong Chin found work as a seamstress in a Chinatown sweatshop . She joined the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union and rose up the ranks to become local shop chair and then chair of the executive committee of Local 23-25.