“How better could she serve her country?”: Cultural Translators, U.S. Women’s History, and Kang Cheng’s “An Amazon in Cathay”

This article revisits a 1912 short story by Kang Cheng, a Chinese female missionary physician prominent in both the United States and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scholars have interpreted this story as evidence of Kang’s uncritical acceptance of American missionary emphasis on women serving the nation only through work for other women and children. Placing the story in the context of the history of Kang’s medical work, this article argues that Kang’s ideology is more accurately seen as a synthesis between late-nineteenth-century Chinese nationalist and American missionary thought. Even while supporting the missionary enterprise, she challenged notions of racial hierarchy embedded in much missionary practice. The article ultimately addresses the question of the historical treatment of women who functioned as cultural translators, arguing that attention to such women is essential as the field of U.S. women’s history becomes more transnational.