A fearful teenager who found her freedom through travel, Marsha Jean left Hong Kong aged 18 and just kept going
- Marsha Jean flew to Australia thinking to end her life, but realised she could travel and began exploring. Working here and there, she’s visited 40 countries
- Five years in, Jean is in no hurry. ‘I take my time,’ she says. And by confronting her doubts and fears, she’s gained ‘life skills I never imagined I’d have’
Hongkonger Marsha Jean is not exactly sure where she is.
“I left Berlin a few weeks ago, by train to Frankfurt, then flew to Spain. Now I’m in a little town one hour from Malaga,” she says, referring to the province on the southern Mediterranean coast, in Andalusia. “I had to have a negative Covid-19 test result to enter Malaga province, and quarantine is not required. Each province/ community in Spain has different rules.
“Now I’m on a permaculture farm run by a lovely couple in their sixties. There are three long-term volunteers here and we get food and board for doing chores like picking vegetables … yesterday I painted a fence. It’s so beautiful and peaceful here.”
To prove her point she leaves her Zoom call screen and wanders outside, holds her laptop high and does a slow panoramic scan of her surroundings. She is right, it is beautiful: the rising sun casts a soft light over country fields sprinkled with olive trees, the silence broken by a rooster’s crow.
Jean, 23, has been living a nomadic lifestyle since she was 18, when she left Hong Kong. She does not want to dwell on her life in the city of her birth but it was a dark time – so dark, she says, that she bought a one-way ticket to Australia, where she planned to travel the west coast, spend all her money and then end her life.
“I gained freedom by running away. I was a lanky, suicidal and fearful teenager, I had no confidence and was afraid of everything,” says Jean, who holds British and Australian passports, which make “travelling and working a lot easier”.
