For nearly a month, the Jamaique steamed west through the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, reversing the romanticized voyage to Indochina depicted in many colonial novels. Of the twenty-one Cambodian students aboard, only three were more than twenty-three years old; six were under twenty. Except for one or two who had spent their childhood in Cochinchina, none of them had been outside of Cambodia. This journey was their first adventure. Five of them—Chau Seng, Mey Mann, Mey Phat, Saloth Sar, and Uch Ven—later rose to prominence in the Cambodian Communist movement. They became Communists when it was the popular thing to do—during the early 1950s under the unstable Fourth Republic in France when a Communist-controlled resistance movement in Cambodia bravely confronted the French colonial rulers. This period marked the heyday of the Communist party of France. The Khmer students’ time in Paris coincided with the last years of Stalin’s life and the apotheosis of the cult of personality surrounding him. The Communist party, one of the strongest in France, was considered the most Stalinist party outside eastern Europe. The years 1949-1953 also marked the victory of communism in China and the confrontation between Communist and anticommunist armies in the Korean War. To many young Khmer and millions of young people in France, communism seemed to be the wave of the future.1

During the sea voyage, however, it is unlikely that the young Cambodians gave politics much thought. Most of them probably supported the Democrats at home, and their political views probably mingled hero worship for Son Ngoc Thanh with vague hopes for Cambodia’s independence. What preoccupied them was not Cambodia’s future, but their own. What would France be like? they asked each other. What will happen to us? Unlike his new acquaintances, Saloth Sar had been uprooted and transplanted several times. Plucked out of his parents’ village as a little boy, he had been dropped into a French primary school in Phnom Penh and then sent as a boarder to Kompong Cham. His time at the Ecole Technique had been another readjustment. Therefore, he was probably calmer, more self-assured, and less homesick than the others.