Evacuation: 1975
Loung was playing near her home when trucks filled with Khmer Rouge troops rolled into her neighborhood. The populace of Phnom Penh, estimated at nearly two million people, was forced to evacuate. The Ungs abruptly left their home with what few belongings they could stow in their truck. When the truck ran out of fuel, they gathered the bare essentials that they could carry and began what became a seven-day trek toward Bat Deng in a throng of evacuees, harried by the bullhorns of the soldiers. Along the way, they stopped at night to sleep in the fields and to search for food. Seng Im Ung, posing as the father of a peasant family, was fortunate to get by a military checkpoint in Kom Baul without being detained; many evacuees who were perceived to be a threat to the new government, because of their previous education or political position, were summarily executed there. On the seventh day, as the Ungs neared Bat Deng, Loung's uncle found them and arranged to bring them by wagon to his village of Krang Truop.
Ung and her family stayed only a few months in Krang Truop because Loung's father was afraid that newly-arrived evacuees from Phnom Penh would reveal his identity. Thus, he made arrangements for the family to be transported to Battambang, the village of Loung's grandmother. However, this plan was thwarted by the Khmer Rouge soldiers. Instead, the Ung family was taken, along with about 300 other evacuees, to the village of Anglungthmor, where they stayed for five months. During that time, more than half of these new arrivals at Anglungthmor died of starvation, food poisoning, or disease. Malnourishment was severe. Again fearing that discovery of his ties to the Lon Nol government was imminent, Loung's father pleaded to have his family relocated. The Khmer Rouge ordered them taken to Ro Leap, where about sixty other families arrived on the same day.