Today’s book is Letters to Betsey, by Jennie L. Cody. Hardcover published 1915 by The Griffith and Rowland Press, Philadelphia.
The author, a native of Michigan, had been a missionary in China for six years when this book of letters to her sister was published. Her correspondence tells of her experiences with a Christian mission in Hanyang and other locations.
Often, the author uses demeaning and stereotypical terms about the Chinese people. She is focused more on bringing salvation to the “heathens” than understanding their culture. But she is certainly game for the challenges and rigors of her situation, and she is sincere in her desire to lessen the suffering she witnesses during war and famine. She writes: 
We are having the worst epidemic of smallpox since I came to China. There has been one death on the compound, the pastor’s little grandchild. Thousands have died in the three cities. . . . Most of the children we see on the streets have monkeys made of cloth pinned to their backs. People think that smallpox is caused by an evil spirit named Liang-liang. Liang-liang is afraid of monkeys, so the mothers make a cloth monkey and pin it on the child’s garment to scare the spirit away.
In her Foreword, Helen Barrett Montgomery, noted Baptist social reformer and activist, praises the book as
[A]n unvarnished statement of the real experiences of a real missionary. Many workers in our missionary societies are unfamiliar with just the sort of intimate details about every-day life that Miss Cody has given, in these letters of hers actually written to friends at home, which have received very little editing and are therefore all the more valuable as a true transcript from the life of an American girl in China.
Also currently in stock at BrainiacBooks.com:
Sown in Chinese Soil: The Life of Francoise Teilhard de Chardin, Sr. Marie Alberic du Sacre-Coeur, Little Sister of the Poor, 1879-1911
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