By the middle of the 1920s, Sanderson had settled fully into running the Abigail Hart Scott Memorial Girls’ School at Kakchieh. An Alumnus update from the 1925–26 academic year described her duties as hiring Chinese staff, teaching English, music, and Bible, and managing the general operation of the school, and by the 1928–29 year the Alumnus was using the title “principal” formally. She had moved well beyond the language study of her first years in China and was now delivering instruction in Chinese across multiple subjects. Her correspondence home rarely reached for the grand evangelistic themes of older missionary writing. She wrote about the schedule, the teachers, the fees, and the individual girls who needed placement. After the 1922 typhoon, what she had fretted about in print was the mat shed she had lost and the students who would have to be turned away in consequence. The records of her thirteen years at Kakchieh consistently picture her in this register, a woman thinking institutionally about her school and individually about her students.
The large photograph above gives that register in a single image. Sanderson sits at the center of the composition at a small portable organ, head bowed slightly to the keys, her white blouse and dark sash visible against the pale stone of the courtyard wall behind her. A semicircle of girls in matching white tops stands close around her, all of them holding open hymnals and singing toward the organ. Behind the girls, on the curving stone wall above, dozens more figures are arranged in tiers, including older boys and men from the Kakchieh compound. The picture captures a school commencement or ceremonial service, but its visual structure says more than its occasion. Sanderson is not standing apart and supervising. She is in the center of the music she taught these girls in Chinese, accompanying them on the same instrument she had played in the Colby Glee Club fifteen years earlier. The students fan out from her in a way that makes the source of the music and the source of the room’s attention obvious.
The smaller photographs below shows more of the everyday of school life. Boarding schools of this period asked their teachers to oversee not only academics but recreation, sewing, housework, and the spiritual life of the dormitory, and Sanderson’s day ran on this rhythm for thirteen years. By January 1935, the Alumnus was framing Abbie as one of Colby’s most established women missionaries. The school had grown well beyond the small grammar-grade institution she had inherited and was now offering middle-school work and fuller English instruction.
Sanderson came home on furlough in 1937 expecting a routine year stateside, but her father was dying. She extended her leave to nurse him at the family home in South Berwick, where he died on January 4, 1939. By the time she was free to plan a return, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident had become the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chaoshan coast was under Japanese occupation, and the schools she had run were closing or relocating inland. She used the years for graduate study, taking advanced coursework at Hartford Seminary’s Kennedy School of Missions, Cornell, Yale, and Columbia Teachers College. The Pacific War made return impossible until 1946. She finally sailed back to Swatow that year, twenty-eight years after she had first arrived as a language student, into a school and a country very different from the ones she had left in 1937.