Serena Chuop isn't running anymore

May 22, 2011
By Marie Donovan , Sun Correspondent
Lowell Sun (Massachusetts)

LOWELL -- Serena Chuop probably spent a lot more time running in the woods when she was a kid than you did.

But it was no game. Chuop, who recently opened a new dentistry practice at the Gateway Center II, estimates she was on the run from the Khmer Rouge in her native Cambodia with her mother, Yvonne Cheng, for about four years. They eventually reached Thailand, where they managed to get a sponsor allowing them to emigrate to the United States.

"I came to the U.S. in 1981," said Chuop, who spent 10 years in California with her mother before moving to Lowell. A 1992 graduate of Lowell High School, where she served as president of the Cambodian Association and graduated seventh in her class, Chuop went on to earn bachelor's and medical degrees, and complete a post-doctoral residency in general dentistry from Boston University. At the same time, she worked two jobs to pay for her education.

Gateway Family Dental, her new practice, provides all general dentistry services and features digital X-rays and a paperless patient chart system. The practice offers a 10 percent discount for people without dental insurance and free consultations for new patients.

"With the digital-chart system, you can receive your patient data via email so there's less clutter," said Chuop, who has two dental assistants who can print out any document a patient requests.

Before opening Gateway Family Dental, Chuop worked part time at Marlboro Dentistry Associates. She and her husband, Sein Siao, an instructor at BU's dental school, have 2- and 5-year-old boys at home.

Now that her boys are a little older, she felt it was an ideal time to open up her own practice in her adopted hometown.

"I always wanted to come back here to the community. I have very good friends here," said Chuop, whose mother, Cheng, still lives with her and has worked as a health counselor in Lowell for the past two decades.

Working two jobs to put herself through dental school was nothing for Chuop compared to her harrowing ordeal in Cambodia's jungle.

"We started running during the war in 1975. I was 2 years old," said Chuop.

Her father, an engineer, couldn't join them because he had already been killed.

"They had a list of people who were executed," Chuop said.

The Khmer Rouge set about trying to locate everyone on that list, considering them obstacles to the communist "utopia" that its leader, Pol Pot, wanted to create. If your name, or even the name of your parents were on that list, your best bet for survival was to get out of the country.

On foot.

"In order to get out, you had to actually run. If you didn't, they would execute you," Chuop said.

Some educated people tried to pose as peasant farmers, but it didn't always work.

"My aunt -- she couldn't fool them. I was present when they took her and my 7-year-old cousin, Stefan," Chuop said.

Both were executed.

The first time Chuop and her mother went on the run, they were captured.

"We were captured for a few years. It was kind of like a concentration camp and we were on a list to eventually be executed," she said.

Because her mother was a midwife, though, they were temporarily spared. Chuop's mother helped deliver babies for Khmer Rouge army officers' wives.

"Back in our country as a midwife, you're really beloved," Chuop said. "The reason my mother and I made it was the nature of my mother's profession. They needed her; my mother delivered every single one of their babies."

One day, though, a Khmer Rouge officer's wife slipped Cheng a note warning her that a mass execution was scheduled for the next day, and she and Chuop were among those to be targeted.

"We took off in the night with some other people. I just recall running through the jungle, water up to my head and my mother had to carry me. Some people made it and some didn't," said Chuop, who was 6.

Fortunately, Chuop and her mother were among those who made it across the Thailand border.

Chuop returned to Cambodia for the first time about five years ago for a visit.

"It was nice," she said. "There's a lot of poverty there, a lot of hungry people there, though. It's kind of sad, you just want to help everybody out. We're so lucky here."