This is a study of the oral histories of some fifty Midwest Protestant women missionaries who went to China in the early twentieth century. How were they, as immigrant women living in the Midwest rural areas, involved in the missionary movement around the turn of the century? How did gender, race, class and ethnicity underlie their intercultural communication with the Chinese? More as cultural agents than evangelists and highly sensitive to cultural differences, I shall argue the women missionaries both shaped and dysfunctioned the larger international power structure and ideological conflict between the Protestant doctrine and the traditional Chinese culture. They focused on developing understanding and friendship with the local Chinese and contributing to what were, in their perceptions, the ideals of social reform that should see no national boundaries. The intercultural relationship developed by the women missionaries can be neither confined to an assimilation or resistance dichotomy, nor considered a rigid imposition of Christian values and beliefs. Their stories tell the readers how they lived within and with another culture and gained understanding from a bicultural background. They created working and intellectual space in which their subjectivity mediated relationships between their subordinate positions and power, and between their social ideals and cross-cultural settings.