Lệ Xuân's education at the Lycée Albert Sarraut, a prestigious French school in Hanoi, was entirely in French, and she remembered as a schoolgirl learning about French history but nothing about Vietnamese history, and of singing songs about the forests and mountains of France, observing later the purpose of her education was to eradicate any sense of a Vietnamese identity, and to make her into a proper young Frenchwoman. The purpose of French educational policies in Vietnam was always in reference to France's self-proclaimed ("civilizing mission") to make all Vietnamese into "Frenchmen with yellow skin," and thus French teachers tried to stamp out any sense of a Vietnamese identity in their students. The message French teachers taught their students was that to be French was to be "civilized" and to be Vietnamese was to be "uncivilized." She then dropped out of Lycée Albert Sarraut. She spoke French at home and could not write in Vietnamese; as an adult, she drafted her speeches in French and had them translated into Vietnamese. She gained a reputation in her youth as a tomboy who loved ballet and piano, once dancing solo at Hanoi's National Theatre. She had an elder sister named Trần Lệ Chi (who married the Frenchman Etienne Oggeri and changed her name to Lechi Oggeri) and a younger brother, Trần Văn Khiêm. Like many other Vietnamese, Lệ Xuân was to find that no matter how hard she tried to be French, that the French were only prepared to accept whites as French.