Lin Qi Hui, 80, looks like any other grandfather next door. However, his life has been extraordinary and ironical.

The fact that the Muar-born retired octogenarian from China recently visited his hometown and paid respects to his long dead family members, friends and comrades as a private and foreign tourist is a testimony to the ironical twists and turns of regional history of the last century.

But then Lin had never been alone in his traumatic experiences: like so many hundreds of the ex-allies, ex-heroes or ex-heroines of the British Empire in the Pacific War in Malaya, Lin was later hunted down, arrested, detained, tortured and prosecuted as a 'terrorist' and banished to China by the returned colonialists after the war had ended.

"I was a man wanted and hunted not only by the Japanese fascists during the war, but also British colonial authorities after the war had ended and, upon my arrival at southern China in August 1949 as the result of British banishment, the Kuomintang (China's Nationalist Party) regime," he said when met by this writer in the house of his relatives in Petaling Jaya.