John MacWillie, Jr. was born August 10, 1903, in the village of Kuling (Luchan) in the mountainous area near Poyang Hu, Jiangxi province in old imperial China. His father, Dr. John MacWillie, a medical missionary temporarily employed by the United Evangelical Mission in Changsha, Central China delivered him. At the time of his birth his father and mother were vacationing in Kuling at one the many summer bungalows owned by different church missions operating in China at the beginning of the twentieth century.

 The summers in Hunan Province where his father and mother were posted were unbearable to most people, locals and foreigners alike, caused by the extraordinarily hot humid days and the bright sun's warming of the motionless water-soaked lowland regions of China.

It was, therefore, not unusual for foreign families to move into the adjacent hills and mountains for the entire summer to get away from the unbearable heat and humidity. Husbands would stay and work in the cities during the week and visit their families on the weekends in the mountains. If they were fortunate, families would take the entire month of August off to spend time in the cooler mountains. Young “Johnny” spent most of his early childhood where the Yangtze River converges with other bodies of water at Hanyang-Hankow-Wuchang in Hubei Province.Because of the multitude of administrative, medical, teaching and outreach program responsibilities given to his parents and the limited qualified medical personnel available to assist them in their undertakings there was an enormous demand on their individual time.

John MacWillie jr. and his bride
Eleanor LaVahn Buhrmann
Wed in Berkeley, California.

  Consequently, little time was left to provide proper parenting, language training or schooling for John.  His mother, through home instruction and study, tried to provide John with his initial education. The family home in Anhui province and later at Wu Chang was so isolated from the public that he had few friends to play or socialize with. It was not until John was six years old when his younger brother, Donald, was born that he had a real playmate and a very young one at that. Not long after Donald’s birth John found himself traveling with his family touring the Orient, then traveling to Moscow via the Trans-Siberian Railroad and finally on to London where his father had enrolled in an advanced medical school program to update and hone his medical skills. His dad was taking his first sabbatical after seven years in China. One year after his return to China John was sent off to an American elementary boarding school in the mountains of Kuling (Luchan). He spent approximately two years there returning home only during school vacations. As a result he spent the entire 1911 Revolution in the safety of the mountains. After Kuling young John was shipped off to Shanghai where he attended the American-Shanghai boarding school for boys for two more years. In 1914, while in school in Shanghai he joined the British Boy Scouts. The Boy Scout program was something John found great interest in and remained affiliated with it for the rest of his life. His formal education in China ended in Shanghai.

 

Because of Canada's strong ties to and support for the policies of the United States the English would not let Canadian children attend their British diplomat schools to advance their education. Therefore, his father and mother decided to send John Jr. to an all boys' preparatory school in the United States. So in 1915, at the age of 12, John Jr. journeyed by steamship with his mother, father and brother, Donald,  to Japan, Hawaii and then on to America to become a student at the Lawrenceville preparatory school in New Jersey with the thought of attending Princeton or Harvard University in the future.