In summer 1935, Sâr went to live with his brother Suong and the latter's wife and child. That year he began an education at a Roman Catholic primary school, the École Miche, with Meak paying the tuition fees. Most of his classmates were the children of French bureaucrats and Catholic Vietnamese. He became literate in French and familiar with Christianity. Sâr was not academically gifted and was held back two years, receiving his Certificat d'Etudes Primaires Complémentaires in 1941 at the age of 16. He had continued to visit Meak at the king's palace and it was there that he had some of his earliest sexual experiences with some of the king's concubines.