(Cornell University Library)
Sanderson sailed from Vancouver in early March 1918 and arrived in Swatow that April, joining the small American Baptist mission compound at Kakchieh across the bay from the city. Her first two years were spent on language study, working through the required examinations in the local Teochew dialect rather than Mandarin. The assignment demanded a fourth language from a young woman who had already studied English literature, German, and French at Colby. Teochew, a southern Min variety unrelated to any European language and tonal in ways nothing in her training had prepared her for, had to be learned not from a textbook but from daily immersion in Kakchieh and from Chinese tutors. She finished those examinations just in time to take charge of the Abigail Hart Scott Memorial Girls’ School, stepping in shortly before Miss Culley left on furlough. The school had been turning over teachers and missionary wives for decades, and at twenty-six years old, on her first overseas assignment, Sanderson took over its day-to-day operation, a role that would grow into a formal principalship she held through her 1937 furlough.
Sanderson’s first years in the field tested her quickly. She survived the August 1922 Swatow typhoon, one of the deadliest tropical storms in Chinese coastal history, and wrote a vivid account of it for the Colby Alumnus the following winter. She returned home to Maine in June 1924 for her first furlough but did not treat the trip as a year off. She came back to Colby for commencement, returned to campus that November to give a public address on her work at the girls’ school, and kept her American supporters connected to Kakchieh through the months in between. Six years after arriving as a language student, she had crossed from precarious newcomer to having a new home in China.
(Yale Divinity Library)