Pilley, John A. and Muriel C.

1907 - 1960
1907 - 2002
Teachers and missionaries
Methodist
China and Sarawak

Mr and Mrs John Allen Pilley were both children of American missionaries to China. They were born and grew up in China, and together they dedicated their lives to the people of China and then Sarawak, Malaysia. 

Gail Pilley Harris, elder daughter of the Pilleys, in her yet-to-be published book The Blessed Journey, wrote about her parents: “There is a principle of Love in the universe, to which we can aspire and support or reject to our detriment. This principle exists independently of any religion and yet is found in most religious traditions. Mom and Dad were Christians and their service of love represented the best Christianity has to offer.”

Muriel Caldwell Pilley was a friend to all [1]as revealed in her book The Hills of T'Ang: Forty Years in South China about her life in China, Sibu and Sarikei in Sarawak (1949-1960) and after she had returned to the US where she lived in Nashville, Tennessee (1960-2002).

John Allen Pilley was born on December 15, 1907 in Shanghai. His mother died when he was four and he had a sister called Margaret (Pilley Rodgers) and two brothers, Edward and Marvin. John was home-schooled during his early years. His father, Edward Pilley, was an evangelist in the Chekiang province in China. Some of John’s happiest childhood memories were in the home built by his father in the lovely mountain resort of Mokanshan, near Shanghai.[2] 

John attended the Shanghai American School (SAS) from 1918 to 1925. In 1929, after graduating from Washington and Lee University in Virginia, USA, he taught for a year in Texas before going back to China to teach in SAS in 1930. At SAS, he met fellow teacher Muriel Caldwell. They were married on December 22, 1931 in the Little Stone Church in Foochow, China. In 1934, the couple went home for furlough and took up further studies at Syracuse University, New York.

They returned to China in 1935. John was offered a teaching post as a contract teacher (similar to the later Peace Corps Movement) at Anglo Chinese College (ACC) in Foochow. In addition to giving talks to various student fellowships and Christian groups, he was frequently asked to preach in nearby villages on weekends. To do so, he had to walk many miles and was subject to ambush by bandits. However, the Pilley family members were spared many times by the bandits out of respect for Muriel’s father, Rev Harry Caldwell.[3]

Muriel gave piano lessons at Hua Nan School and taught classes for John when he was ill, which was quite often due to malaria. They lived in a small apartment at the top of a “godown”, a concrete storage building owned by the Methodist Mission. The summer heat could be unbearable but Muriel was happy because they could keep a dog, and because she did not need to be embarrassed by their dwelling. “One of her criticisms of the mission and missionaries in general was that living accommodations were often much more luxurious than the average Chinese home. She was embarrassed by the discrepancy and felt it was detrimental to the Christian message of love and equality. The mission compound wall added to the perception of wealth and exclusion,“ said Gail.[4] 

From 1937 onwards, John taught in ACC amidst Japanese aggression. The sounds of sirens was a daily torture although the US flags on their roof top protected them from the occasional bombings. Rev Caldwell, Muriel’s father, was pastoring a Methodist church in Futsing, 35 miles from Foochow, at the time. Excerpts from his unfinished journals give a glimpse of what the missionaries and the Chinese people went through during the war years.[5]

Their first child, Robin, was born on July 28, 1939. His given Chinese name was “Loh Ming”(Happy Citizen). In September, the family boarded the Empress of Japan to return to the US for another furlough, amidst fears of torpedoes as Great Britain and France had declared war on Germany two days after the German invasion of Poland.

John went to Peabody College to pursue an MA in Education. The couple had applied to be missionaries and were consecrated as such in Philadelphia by the New York Board of Missions. But there were times when they asked themselves why they wanted to return to China. According to Gail, the only explanation lay in the fact that “missionary life in China was all that either of them ever knew. Teaching and serving in China was what their parents had done and was what they wanted to do.”[6] 

They returned to China in 1940 for language study in Peking (Beijing). To their disappointment, when they arrived in Shanghai in October, they were told that all Americans were to leave the Far East because tension in the international situation was growing. They were redirected to Foochow but once again, they ignored the request to evacuate. John did not want to leave Anglo Chinese College and the people. Upon arrival in Foochow, they got busy again with Mandarin lessons.[7] 

When Foochow was occupied by the Japanese in April 1941, the Pilley family planned to escape upriver. But the Japanese withdrew in September and the family was able to travel up the Min River to Yangkow, 150 miles away. It was a six-day journey by boat amidst dangers of either being caught by the Japanese or robbed by bandits. The ACC faculty and students also moved to Yangkow. Those were agonizing days when many locals starved to death and poverty led to children being sold. Using gifts from US friends, the Pilleys helped the needy in many life-threatening situations.

Their second child, Gail, was born on November 16, 1941 in Yangkow amidst bubonic plague, malaria and air raids. Eva Li, Muriel’s good friend, had given birth to a baby girl a few hours before Gail was born. The Chinese name for the ACC was “Ing Hua”, “Ing” meaning English or Anglo and “Hua” meaning flowery kingdom or China. As it was the ACC’s Founders’ Day that day, Mrs Li’s daughter was named Ing and Gail was named Hua (so ‘Loh Hua’ = Happy Flowery Kingdom). 

In late November, the ACC was closed due to the plague. According to Muriel, sickness seemed to be always present in their home with coughs and fevers and malaria, and in the village, bubonic and pneumonic plague. The Pilleys could hear coolies grunting as they carried the dead out to the hills for burial. Muriel would sprinkle lime around the house to discourage rats and flea powder was sprinkled in the children’s beds.[8] 

A torn telegram dated December 8, 1941 about the bombing of Pearl Harbor is a poignant reminder of what that news meant to the family and other American missionaries in China. Their country was now at war with Japan. Despite difficult and trying times, the Pilleys continued to give sacrificially to the poor and needy. Their house “by the side of the road” became a refuge for travellers and sometimes, it was even turned into a hospital. War time led to the cost of living going up and also shortage of food. The Pilleys bought three cows to rear for milk. Although John was sick and weak due to having to walk many miles in extremely hot or cold weather on many occasions, he would only drink one cup of milk daily and gave the rest to others who were ill or under-nourished. He had malaria so many times that he suffered severe jaundice for quite some time.

In the spring of 1944 when the Japanese were moving from the Yangtze River to Canton, all Americans and missionaries were ordered to evacuate. “John and I did not want to leave Yangkow — the school and the friends who had become so dear after nearly three years of shared hardships,” said Muriel Pilley in The Hills of Tang.[9] But after much struggling and praying, the Pilleys left with very heavy hearts. By then, both children were frail and had also developed chicken pox. 

On June 16, 1944, when the launch was ready to pull out of Yangkow, the Women’s Society of Christian Services (WSCS) ladies, under rain and umbrellas sang “Be not dismayed, what’er betide...”[10]It was a sad and tearful farewell for all.

The Pilleys escaped to India where John enlisted in the US Army as a member of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in late 1944. For most of the following year, he was in the field with OSS. He returned to Nashville in December 1945 after the war ended. The rest of the family went by ship to Pasadena, California. Muriel and the children spent Christmas of 1944 in California and in the spring of 1945, they went by rail to Chicago and finally Nashville, Tennessee. 

The Pilleys left Nashville in 1946 to return to Foochow, their “home”. The ACC had also moved back to Foochow. The days were filled with teaching, marking papers, school activities, speaking engagements, and entertaining visitors while at the same time taking care of their own children. There were visitors so often that Muriel asked their cook to always prepare two or three extra places for meals.[11]

On October 13, 1947, their third child, Marilyn (“Loh Guong” or Happy Light) was born in Foochow. Signs of dislike of foreigners were evident. Despite rumours that the Communists would be taking over Foochow, the Pilleys and others tried their best to prepare for the much anticipated Christmas celebration at ACC. The deputy president of ACC, Mr Ling Ung Chung, had accepted an offer to go to Borneo to be the first principal of a Methodist school (the present SMK Methodist) in Sibu, which by then was known as “New or Little Foochow”. Mr and Mrs Ling invited the Pilleys to join them, especially with rumours that “Mr Pilley’s life is in danger” because of his assignment as part of the OSS during the war.

By April 1949, Nanking and Soochow (Suzhou) had fallen to the Communists. Rice prices continued to soar. Some ACC boys were missing, others were teaching the servants “down with the foreigners”. As the situation was critical, after a mission meeting, Bishop Carleton Lacy (1888-1951) announced solemnly, “Each family must decide whether to go or to stay. There will be no consensus.”[12] Muriel knew that it was time to leave China again although part of her wanted to stay. John did not want to leave. They prayed earnestly for God’s guidance. When Muriel shared with John “Go to Borneo” as God’s answer, John paused and finally said, “We would be still working with the Chinese.”[13]

On May 14, 1949, together with other missionaries, they boarded the SS Heinrick Jessen as “refugees”. It was their final farewell to the hills of T’Ang. 

On their journey to Hong Kong, Muriel was miserably sick mainly due to exhaustion. While waiting in Hong Kong, they received news of approval by the Missions Board to “go to Borneo”. They sailed south. After a brief stop in Singapore where they stayed at Trinity Theological School at Mt Sophia, they boarded the SS Bruas and arrived in Borneo on June 27, 1949.

Sarawak

Upon arrival in Sarawak, John worked with Mr Ling Ung Chung to set up the Methodist Secondary School in Sibu by combining the Anglo-Chinese Boys School with the Yiik Ing Girls School. John became the principal from June 1951 to 1952. Muriel kept herself busy teaching English and literature while also producing plays to raise funds for social work projects.

She was shocked and upset to discover that the same practice of girls being abused and even sold was also happening in Sibu.[14] Determined to do what she could not in Foochow, she took immediate steps to set up an orphanage in Sibu. In 1950, the first building of the Methodist Children’s Home was completed. She raised funds by staging a performance of Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet” in Foochow! Muriel herself translated the play into Foochow for the sake of the packed Foochow audience. 

The Children’s Home was set up next to the Pilleys’ home called “Journey’s End” because Muriel believed that this would be the last of their postings and journeys in Asia.[15]There were five girls in the first Children’s Home in 1950. 

After a furlough in the US in 1953, John was appointed to serve in the Sarikei district and within a short span of four years, he founded the Anglo-Chinese Primary School (ACS) with a hostel and Sii Loh Kindergarten. He also built a missionary house with a special water tank, and the beautiful Methodist Hwei Ren Church in the town centre. 

Because of their experience in China, the Pilleys paid special attention to people in the villages. Muriel used her Futsing Foochow to encourage and convince Chinese parents to send their children, especially girls, to school.[16] The ripple effect of their advocacy for “education for all” was strong and lasting. In years to come, many who went to ACS in Sarikei and MSS in Sibu chose teaching as their vocation.[17] 

His tireless efforts and selfless dedication caused John to suffer heart problems. Yet he maintained his three character traits as described by Muriel: cheerfulness, loving-kindness and selflessness.[18]

The family went home for furlough in Nashville in 1957. John returned to Sibu as the education secretary in 1958 for the Methodist Missions, and as principal of Methodist Secondary School in 1959. Muriel started a night school to help students who had failed in the public examinations, and poor and needy youths who did not have access to education.   

John suffered a heart attack in August 1960. The Sibu hospital, ill-equipped to care for him, had to fly in an oxygen tent from Singapore. After six weeks in hospital, he died on November 12, 1960 at the age of 53 and was buried in Sibu.

When reminiscing about the life and work of John Pilley, P.H. Lau, a former student of the Pilleys who later served as the principal of Anglo-Chinese Primary School in Sarikei for many years, said, “He was too dedicated. He was too overworked… there was just too much to do: the school, the church, the social projects. I saw him at times carrying desks and chairs by himself from room to room, even from downstairs to upstairs.”

After John’s death, Muriel and her younger daughter, Marilyn, went back to Nashville, Tennessee for good.[19] Muriel continued to show love and concern for the Children’s home, finding sponsors for the children and helping many needy people who sought her help. She helped a number of Methodist school students apply to different Methodist colleges and universities in Tennessee.[20] 

After settling down in Nashville, Muriel continued her career as an educator. After her retirement in 1972, she returned to visit Sibu and Sarikei at least twice, to overwhelming warmth. In 1989, she managed to make a trip back to her beloved China with her granddaughter Andrea Jackson.

In her mid-80s, she was still active with church activities and was involved in social projects like Habitat for Humanity which builds homes for low-income families. She died on July 12, 2002 at the age of 93 in Nashville following a short illness. In fulfilling her last wish, Gail brought her mother’s ashes back to Sibu in 2006 for burial. A memorial service was held at Wesley Methodist Church. Despite the short notice, the church was packed with people from all over Sarawak whose lives had been touched and transformed by the Pilleys in the 1950s.

In the mid-1960s, the Methodist Church (Sarawak Chinese Annual Conference) leaders in Sibu set up a committee to build a private school in memory of John Pilley. In 1967, the first block of the Pilley Memorial Secondary School was completed. It provided affordable education to many needy youths who would otherwise have had to stop school after failing in public examinations.

In April 1991, the Pilley Memorial School transitioned to become the Methodist Pilley Institute (MPI), offering diploma courses in accounting, business management and computer science. The year 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the MPI, the oldest institute of higher learning in Sarawak with over 800 students. It now also offers Bachelor of Arts degrees with honours in accounting, marketing, finance and investment, and early childhood education.

Since 2006, Gail has been back to Sibu at least eight times. Gail donated money to MPI and the new library in the state-of-the-art new block is named the Gail Pilley Library. Although the Covid-19 pandemic prevented her from coming in 2020 for the 70th anniversary of the Methodist Children’s Home and 27th MPI graduation ceremony, the Pilley legacy will live on for many years, not only in Sibu, Sarawak and Malaysia, but to the far corners of the world. 

Notes

  1. ^ Gail Pilley Harris, The Blessed Journey (yet to be published). In the book, she shares: “For me, assembling the letters, documents and pictures into a coherent narrative is both an act of love and an act of repentance for my indifference as a child. The inscription on my father’s grave in Sibu, Sarawak reads ‘December 15, 1907-November 12, 1960. And now abided faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love’. On my mother’s grave are the dates November 1, 1907-July 12, 2002, and the inscription, ‘She lived in a house by the side of the road and was a friend to all.’ ” The inscription is a modification of a line from one of her mother’s favourite poems,  http://www.housebythesideoftheroad.com/a-poem.
  2. ^  According to John Pilley’s sister Margaret in a private message to John’s wife: “High on this mountain top John absorbed the vast spaciousness of God’s universe and its breathtaking beauty. Here he felt an awareness of God and through this nearness, he sensed the pulse beat of humanity, of Chinese humanity, and there stole through his being the tremendous awareness of God’s love and a desire to share this love with others.”
  3. ^ Rev Caldwell, who was well-known as the great “tiger hunter” who had saved many Chinese children and villagers from being snatched and killed by tigers, later became a middleman between bandits and village heads. Sources: Harry Caldwell’s unpublished autobiography and his book Blue Tiger.
  4. ^ Harris, The Blessed Journey.
  5. ^ An account from the unpublished autobiography of Reverend Harry Caldwell states: We saw much of the Japanese soldiers in action during the several months of occupation of Futsing. Much that took place is too horrible to relate. At the corner of our compound was a house of a very wealthy man who made his money in Java. His family had fled the city. The Japanese took over the house as one of the ‘Comfort Stations’ for officers. Some of the women were brought in from elsewhere. Others were taken in and around the city. These women and girls were imprisoned there to serve the Japanese officers. The barred windows opened on our compound. The imprisoned young women looked wistfully through these bars into a mission compound where they felt they might be safe. Throughout the day and all through the night a regular hubbub was kept up, wild singing at times and screaming of women being chased from room to room. It would be difficult to say how many of these unfortunate women were done to death… Many wounded men and women were brought into our compound for first aid treatment… It sure was a reign of terror. The populace suffered and there was nothing we could do about it.” 
  6. ^ Harris, The Blessed Journey
  7. ^ Harris, The Blessed Journey, 273. According to Gail, the lessons took up five hours a day. Muriel resented the time spent away from her son. They hired an amah named Ai Nguk Cia who became a loving and faithful nanny.
  8. ^ Muriel C. Pilley, The Hills of T'Ang: Forty Years in South China (Bloomington, Indiana:‎ Xlibris Corp, 2002), 329.
  9. ^ Pilley, The Hills of T’Ang, 388.
  10. ^ Pilley, The Hills of T’Ang, 388.
  11. ^ Pilley, The Hills of T’Ang, 475. The writer recalls that the Pilleys followed the same practice during their years in Sarawak. She can still visualise the long, rectangular dining table that was always full of people during the few months when she and her two little sisters stayed with the Pilleys in their missionary house before moving to the ACS hostel in Sarikei in 1956. The Pilleys were more Foochow than many Foochows. Visitors were always told not to be kerchiik when invited to stay back for meals. 
  12. ^ Pilley, The Hills of T’Ang, 549.
  13. ^ Pilley, The Hills of T’Ang, 548.
  14. ^ The writer and her two sisters were taken in by the Pilleys when the girls’ elder brother approached the couple in June 1955 after their mother died. Fearing that the girls might be sold or given away, the Pilleys immediately brought the girls to stay in their house. 
  15. ^ “Journey’s End” was a wooden house which was later bought over by the Methodist Missions for housing missionaries. It is where the present-day Wesley Methodist Church stands.     During their 11 years in Sibu and Sarikei, the Pilleys’ two older children, Robin and Gail, were sent to study in an American International school in India, coming “home” to Sarawak only during their summer holidays. 
  16. ^ The writer remembers following the Pilleys in a van to go to the sanbah (village) to ring bells to attract villagers to come out. After a year or two, it was no longer necessary to ring the bells. People came to town to ask and some to plead for their children,including the girls, to be enrolled in school.
  17. ^ Mrs Pilley was the first English teacher that the writer remembers. She still treasures her  childhood memory of Mrs Pilley using the common pictorial textbook to teach students: “This is a man. This is a pen. A man and a pen”, etc. One day in class, the writer asked in Foochow, “Mrs Pilley, what is the meaning of the word ‘but’?” She replied, “But jiew see mee-look”, i.e. “But means mee-look” in her sweet Foochow accent. That lesson and sitting next to Mrs Pilley on the staircase of their missionary house watching her marking test papers had a lasting impact on the writer, who later became a teacher and then a principal for over 40 years. 
  18. ^ Pilley, The Hills of T’Ang, 504.
  19. ^ Many, including the writer, went from Sarikei to join the Sibu folk who were at the airport to see them off. The crowd was so large that even the airport staff commented, “We have never seen our airport packed like today.” 
  20. ^ Among them were the writer’s siblings. “The fact that all five of us, from a very poor family, ended up studying in Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Texas, was all by the grace of God through the love and sacrifice of John and Muriel,” recounts the writer.

Judy Wong Liong Yung

The writer, a student of Mrs Muriel Pilley, was inspired by Mrs Pilley to become a teacher. She later became principal of the Methodist Pilley Institute (2000-2016).

 

Bibliography

Caldwell, Harry R. Blue Tiger. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1925 (1st ed.). Greenville, OH: Coachwhip Publications, 2007 (2nd ed.).

Harris, Gail P. The Blessed Journey (unpublished manuscript).  

Pilley, Muriel C. The Hills of T'Ang: Forty Years in South China. Bloomington, Indiana:‎ Xlibris Corp, 2002.