Theresa Loong's documentary about POW father

Even at the age of 11, Theresa Loong knew her father, then a doctor in New Jersey, had lived a more adventurous life. She remembers once asking him about a scar on his back, only to be told, casually, that he had been burned. He didn't give away much, she says, but she always suspected there was more to his story.

It wasn't until a few years ago, when Loong was wading through her father's old papers and found some faded, handwritten pages roughly sewn together, that his story began to unfold. That was when Paul Loong Yok Wah, a Malaysian Chinese, finally opened up about how he had been a prisoner of war in Japan for three years during the second world war - that scar on his back was left by Japanese soldiers.

"Everything was scarce then. There were only a few papers I managed to scrounge here and there, and then I sewed them together into a little booklet," Paul recalls, sitting alongside Theresa, now 41, on a Skype call from New Jersey before she flew to Hong Kong for the screening of her documentary, Everyday is a Holiday, at the Asia Society last Thursday. The booklet had been his diary.

Loong was 19 when he was captured, in Indonesia. He had been a civilian maintaining planes for Britain's air force in Malaya, and was evacuated to Singapore and then Indonesia as Japanese forces advanced.

He was then shipped off to Japan with hundreds of others. Many captives died from dysentery and diarrhoea during that miserable voyage. He went down with dysentery, too, but recovered after being given powdered charcoal as medicine. Another close call came when their ship was torpedoed by the Americans. Fortunately, the shell failed to explode.

In Japan, he was assigned to the Mitsushima prison camp, where he became simply prisoner No102 and was given back-breaking work such as shovelling sand and crushing rocks. Two years later he was sent to the city of Hitachi to mine for copper; it was dangerous work because the small mines were at risk of collapsing.