Kith Meng is the youngest of three sons of Chinese Cambodian businessman Kith Peng Ike. Kith Meng led a comfortable life in his hometown in Kandal Province until 1975 when the advent of the Khmer Rouge regime caused major social upheaval.[4] Kith's family were among those targeted by the Khmer Rouge because of their wealth, ethnicity and socio-economic status. The entire family was sent to a labour camp where, upon arrival, Meng and his two brothers were separated from their parents who later died of starvation.[5] During the confusion resulting from the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea, Meng escaped with his older brother to Phnom Penh, from which they then fled for the refugee camps in Thailand. In Thailand, Meng later related, “they put us in a pig farm...we slept with the pigs...we no longer existed; we had no state, nothing."[5] In 1980, Meng and Thieng were found by a family member in a Thai refugee camp and both brothers immigrated to Australia, where they worked and attended school in the nation's capital, Canberra.