In 1934 or 1935, when Saloth Sar was nine years old, he and his older brother Chhay were sent by their parents to live with Meak and Suong in Phnom Penh. Sar probably would have preferred the relatively carefree life of Prek Sbauv to the more demanding one of being raised by busy relatives in a strange city. Informal adoptions by prosperous relatives are a traditional feature of Cambodian life and therefore should not be taken as indicating estrangement between children and their natural parents. In fact, although Sar’s brother and sister-in-law have insisted that Sar got along well with his parents, he is not known to have mentioned them in conversations with other people. This silence, however, may be related to a conscious effacement of personal information rather than to animosity. There is no evidence that he had conflicts with his father of the sort that characterized the adolescent years of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and other prominent political figures. Indeed, his sister told an interviewer in 1997 that Saloth Sar had come back to Prek Sbauv for his father’s funeral in the late 1950s and contributed to the cost of erecting a memorial stupa. In later life, Sar never mentioned his palace connections. Instead, he tended to emphasize his rural origins.

Soon after arriving in the capital, Saloth Sar spent several months as a novice at Vat Botum Vaddei, a Buddhist monastery near the palace that was favored by the royal family. At such a young age and recently separated from his parents, Sar must have been traumatized by the solemn discipline of the monastery, even though there would have been other little boys with shaven heads wearing yellow robes with him. At the Vat Botum Vaddei he learned the rudiments of Buddhism and became literate in Khmer. Sar was also forced to be obedient. Ironically, for someone who embraced atheism and xenophobia so fervently in later life, this brief period was the only time in his formal education (which lasted until 1952) in which Khmer rather than French was the language of instruction.4

Loth Suong and Chea Samy, who looked after Saloth Sar in the 1940s, maintained that he was an even-tempered, polite, unremarkable child. As a primary student, Samy told the Australian journalist James Gerrand, Sar “had no difficulties with other students, no fights or quarrels.” In examining his early years, I found no traumatic events and heard no anecdotes that foreshadow his years in power. People who met him as an adult found his self-effacing personality, perhaps a carryover from the image he projected as a child, hard to connect with his fearsome behavior in the 1970s. In Loth Suong’s words, “The contemptible Pot [Khmer a-Pot] was a lovely child.”5

Phnom Penh in the 1930s