In World War II, Lin and his family moved to Kunming, Yunnan, where he worked with the Southwest United Universities.
[1] Lin and his wife had six children; Cai Weilian died two days after giving birth to their sixth child in 1939.
In 1954, he married Lian Dizhen (连棣贞), a proofreader at the Nanjing University Press who was about twenty years his junior.
Lin Wenzheng was sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment in November 1957 for allegedly propagating right-wing sentiments, leaving his second wife Lian in charge of the household.
During the Cultural Revolution, Lian was identified by the government as a potential counter-revolutionary, tortured, and ultimately coerced into divorcing Lin; she died two years later.