Before he ever set foot on a movie set, Haing S. Ngor was a trained obstetrician–gynecologist in Phnom Penh. The fall of the city to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in 1975 forced him to conceal his education, his skills, and even his glasses to survive a regime determined to extinguish Cambodia's professional classes — its so-called 'enemies of Year Zero.' Expelled with millions to a rice farm, Ngor endured three terms in prison and kept alive by eating beetles, termites, and scorpions. The personal cost was devastating: his wife, Chang My-Huoy, required a cesarean section and died in labor in 1978 — along with the unborn child — because performing such a lifesaving operation would have imperiled the whole family under the policies and surveillance of the regime. Ngor crawled to a Red Cross-run refugee camp after the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979, worked there as a physician, and emigrated to the United States in 1980 — carrying those wounds into his later work as an activist, author, and the reluctant actor who would become an international symbol of survival.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
A Doctor in Hiding: Ngor’s Survival Under the Khmer Rouge and the Personal Tragedy That Followed
Haing S. Ngor / 1970s
Before he ever set foot on a movie set, Haing S. Ngor was a trained obstetrician–gynecologist in Phnom Penh. The fall of the city to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in 1975 forced him to conceal his education, his skills, and even his glasses to survive a regime determined to extinguish Cambodia's professional classes — its so-called 'enemies of Year Zero.' Expelled with millions to a rice farm, Ngor endured three terms in prison and kept alive by eating beetles, termites, and scorpions. The personal cost was devastating: his wife, Chang My-Huoy, required a cesarean section and died in labor in 1978 — along with the unborn child — because performing such a lifesaving operation would have imperiled the whole family under the policies and surveillance of the regime. Ngor crawled to a Red Cross-run refugee camp after the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979, worked there as a physician, and emigrated to the United States in 1980 — carrying those wounds into his later work as an activist, author, and the reluctant actor who would become an international symbol of survival.
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