Marguerite Higgins Hall was born in Hong Kong, then a British colony, the only child of Lawrence and Marguerite de Godard Higgins.
Marguerite Higgins was born on September 3, 1920, in Hong Kong, then a British Crown colony, to an American father, Lawrence Higgins, and a French mother, Marguerite de Godard. Her father had been a pilot in World War I, and her mother's family background instilled in young Marguerite a cosmopolitan outlook from birth.
As the only child of an international couple living in Asia, Higgins was exposed early to travel, multiple languages, and cultures far from the American mainland—experiences that would shape her later fearlessness in pursuing stories across the globe. The family eventually relocated to California, where she would grow up and pursue her education.
This unusual, well-traveled origin story foreshadowed a life defined by crossing borders, both literal and professional. Higgins would go on to become one of the twentieth century's most celebrated war correspondents, reporting from the European theater of World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War Soviet Union, and the Vietnam War. Her birth in a distant British colony rather than in the United States is often cited by biographers as an early sign of the boundary-crossing, unconventional life she would lead as a trailblazing woman in journalism.