By then Ponnary was teaching Cambodian literature at the Lycée Sisowath. About this time, Saloth Sar embarked on a career teaching French, history, geography, and civics at a newly established private college, Chamraon Vichea (“Progressive Knowledge”), in Phnom Penh. This period of his life was the last one he spent in the open, and the impressions he left are the last we have until after 1975, when gnomic, reverent references to him crop up in party documents and confessions. Intriguingly, all the observations convey a similar picture of a self-composed, smooth-featured teacher who was fond of his students, eloquent but unpretentious, honest, humane, easy to befriend—up to a point—and easy to respect. Was the image spontaneous, calculated, or a conscious mixture of both? In what proportions did it spring from his upbringing, his preferences, or his Communist training? Like the issue of his “charm”—by definition something that exists in the eye of the beholder—these questions are crucial to an understanding of Saloth Sar/Pol Pot. They are also impossible to answer. He certainly brought a partially calculated warmth to his personal encounters—here one is reminded of Ho Chi Minh.

Many recollections of Saloth Sar referred to his skills as a teacher. In choosing to play this role, he drew on the reservoir of reverence Cambodians have always had for their teachers, reflecting the centuries in which education was in the hands of Hindu brahmans or Buddhist monks and the high status accorded teachers in the French Third Republic (under which Saloth Sar was raised). A former engineer told me that “in the Cambodian system, even a mathematics professor teaches ethics.” Students traditionally gave respect to their teachers, as they did to elderly relatives, in exchange for moral guidance. Older brothers (bong) and teachers who returned this respect with warmth and kindness were rare and doubly honored. After years of failing to catch anyone’s attention as a student, Saloth Sar seems to have been an immediate success as a teacher of “progressive knowledge.”