This is Easter Sunday and spring, a great time to stop for a moment and think about the good things of life. So let me tell you about an unlikely love story that began and ended in spring.

They were both San Franciscans, born and raised in Chinatown, children of poor immigrant parents. Both went to San Francisco public schools. And they were as different as could be.

Judy Yung was a professor at UC Santa Cruz when they met, an author with three college degrees including a doctorate. Eddie Fung quit high school to become a Texas cowboy, joined the Army in World War II, was captured by the Japanese and survived more than three years as a prisoner of war, working in camps made famous in the film “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

She got to know him when she interviewed him about his war experiences, first for a long article and then for a book. He was honest and a natural storyteller, with “a fantastic memory for detail,” she said later. “He was an oral historian’s dream come true.”

She didn’t realize it at first, but it was more than that — a mutual attraction. And then, one day, in the middle of an interview, he proposed marriage.

It was unlikely. He was a widower, 80 years old at the time. She was 56. “He was old enough to be my father,” she said. But they had a lot in common. Both were Chinese American and respected Chinese tradition and values. Both liked the outdoors, both liked a game of Scrabble. Eddie was even fond of cats.

She likes to quote an old Chinese story: “As soon as we are born, heaven selects a mate for each of us and links us to them with an invisible red thread.”

“I had been looking for my intended at the end of that red thread for a long time,” she said.

They were married on April 1 in 2003. They picked the day — April Fool’s Day — because they didn’t think their family or friends would believe they’d really gotten married. The minister had a mail-order credential from the Universal Life Church and moonlighted as a belly dance instructor. The whole thing was silly and romantic, and it lasted for 15 years.

After they were married, Judy went on to write Eddie’s biography, “The Adventures of Eddie Fung: Chinatown Kid, Texas Cowboy, Prisoner of War.” The book sold well; a labor of love, literally.

Eddie was a natural for a book, or maybe a movie. A smart kid who hated school, he also hated the restricted life in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He quit school when he could and decided to go to Texas and be a cowboy.

Nobody there had heard of a Chinese cowboy much less a kid who was 5 feet, 3 inches tall and weighed just over 100 pounds. But he was tough and determined, and strong enough to do the work.

After a year or two, he joined the Texas National Guard, was called up into the Army, and shipped overseas. In the dark days of early 1942 his unit, the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, was sent to Java, in what was then the Dutch East Indies. Dutch and allied forces were quickly defeated when the Japanese invaded, and the handful of American troops in Java — including Eddie — spent the rest of the war in prison camps.

The Japanese used them to build a railway from Thailand to Burma, 258 miles through jungle and mountains. They were starved and beaten. More than 200,000 Asians were forced to work on the line, along with 60,000 Allied prisoners of war. Thousands died, one death for every crosstie on that railroad.

“One day, when I had dysentery and malaria, I thought I would just let go,” Eddie said. “But I had a great desire to go back and tell my mother that I finally understood what my parents had tried to teach me all my life. To be myself. To be Chinese. To be a man.” At one point, he weighed only 60 pounds.

The prisoners were freed in August 1945, and Eddie went back to San Francisco, married, attended Stanford, worked for years at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, retired, traveled, found love again and lived his life.

When he first came back to civilian life, he had nightmares and flashes of temper. He hoarded food. “If you have never known hunger, you don’t appreciate food,” he would say. He was always ready for an adventure, however small. “If you have never been enslaved, you don’t know what it means to be free.”

Later, the bitterness faded, but the war had marked him forever. He lived one day at a time.

“Every morning, I would say to him, ‘You’ve lived to see one more day, Eddie,’” Judy remembered.

But every love story has an ending. Eddie Fung died in his sleep last Sunday. He was 95, and this Sunday would have been Eddie and Judy’s 15th wedding anniversary.

“The happiest years of my life,” Judy said last week.