An Asian-American love story to counter the hate: he was a soldier, she was a showgirl, and together they overcame rejection to spend 74 years married

Chinese-American Louis Moore met Japanese-American Nellie Hatsumi Maeda in New York in 1946. They married 10 days later and were together for 74 years

If there’s anything the world needs, he says, it is love. He wants as many people as possible to read his memoir of their life amid hate crimes against Asian-Americans

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Louis Moore and his wife, Nellie, shown in an undated photo. “I had to write the ending after she passed,” he said of his memoir. Nellie died in October. CREDIT: Louis Moore

Published: 6:45pm, 6 May 2021Updated: 6:52pm, 6 May 2021

Louis Moore couldn’t stop staring at the dancer at the China Doll nightclub in New York. It was spring 1946. The second world war had recently ended. Moore was 23, newly discharged from the US Army Air Corps after serving in Europe, and enjoying a night out with his parents and sister at the just-opened Manhattan venue.

Third from the right in the chorus line, she had the sweetest eyes he had ever seen. He returned night after night, hoping to catch her attention.

Weeks later, he spotted her in the window of a nearby cafe, drinking coffee. She smiled when he asked to sit with her. They went for a walk in Central Park and talked and talked.

He was a Chinese-American soldier from New York, whose ship was cheered when he returned from overseas. Nellie Hatsumi Maeda was a Japanese-American woman from California trying to rebuild her life after the US government incarcerated her and her family at the Gila River War Relocation Centre in Arizona.

They wed 10 days later. It was a union that lasted 74 years. His parents, dismayed at Nellie’s Japanese ancestry, didn’t speak to them for the first seven years.

Moore, 98, is now sharing his love story as widely as he can at a time when the country is grappling with a rise in anti-Asian racism during the Covid-19 pandemic. If there is anything this world needs, he said, it is love. Moore, who lives in a retirement community in California, has just published a 78-page memoir about his and Nellie’s lives together. He titled it Eternal Love.