Jill Morgan Marshall, The Life and Death of a TCK

Christmas has a way of reconnecting you with many friends whom you only hear from once a year. News has just come to me from her husband Ian, of the death of Jill Morgan Marshall of White Hill, Pictou Co., Nova Scotia, on 10 November 2011.

Jill, like myself, was the child of members of the American Presbyterian Mission to China. We were both Third Culture Kids (a.k.a. MK’s, mish kids, missionary kids). Our earliest memories were of that tumultuous period in the history of the Middle Kingdom when wars, revolutions, and “liberation” was the story of our childhood. Jill had a further challenge: she had been adopted by her parents shortly before they left for China in 1945. Her parents, the Rev Fred Bruce Morgan, Jr., and her mother, Ruth McNamee Morgan, were assigned to Qingdao, Shandong, where the presence of the United States Navy provided some short-term safety as Mao Tse-tung’s legions were busy conquering North China.

The summer of 1949 we were all evacuated to Hong Kong and for the next two years the Morgans and the MacLeods shared rooms across the hall from each other in the Presbyterian Mission Home, 11A Carnarvon Road, Kowloon. Though the families were poles apart theologically, my mother would (perhaps wistfully) remark on the fact that she could hear Bruce and Ruth talking late into the night. Two years later the building was sold, the Morgans returned to America, and we relocated to Kowloon Tong. The American Presbyterian Mission, one of the largest in China, which had continued for well over a hundred years, was no more.

The years went by. Bruce Morgan became Executive Presbyter for the Presbytery of Albany. The family bought a deserted farmhouse in Gairloch, Pictou Co., Nova Scotia, where they would summer. Our paths crossed again:  in 1963 I had been appointed as ordained missionary to a five-point pastoral charge which grew to include St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Gairloch. Jill Morgan, barely out of her teens, caught the eye of a local farmer, Ian Marshall. I was asked, as Ian’s minister, to perform the nuptials.

The baptism of their first child: Mary and Fraser Marshall on R; Ruth Morgan to my L

It was an extraordinary love match. The Marshall family was active in the neighboring Middle River Church, where Ian’s mother was organist and his father clerk of session. Fraser Marshall – the mentor and friend every pastor needs in his first congregation – also became very much a father figure to Jill, providing  the love and security she had never known. We missionary kids often have difficulty in later life with relationships, solid marriages can be daunting, and the dislocations of our past can  come back to haunt us. But for forty-seven years Ian and Jill maintained a strong, if unusual, relationship: she found in rural Nova Scotia the security that had evaded her as a child. Two hundred people crowded the Eagles Funeral Home Westville for her final obsequies.  It was reassuring to me that she had requested a Salvation Army officer to do the service: a sign perhaps that hers was not only a resilient faith but an abiding confidence in the resurrection of our Lord that hope-fully lasted to the end. And a challenging final chapter it proved to be, with Ian as always faithful and loving to the end.

As I look back over the group of TCK’s, 1949 evacuees from Communist China that I lived with for those two years in the PMH in Kowloon, there is a savage irony as we reflect on where we find ourselves today. For many of us the faith our parents professed  is not ours. But in China, the land where we were called on (without being asked) to share our parents’ sacrificial self-giving, there is a strong, suffering, growing and dynamic Christian community. God’s providence is beyond our understanding: and a troubled teenage daughter of missionaries received the warm embrace of a family and their faith, far from her early years in China. And Jill Morgan Marshall found, I trust, peace at the end.