A story from the records of a missionary family in northwestern Iran serves as a reminder of the fraught dynamics of class and ethnicity in the nineteenth century mission encounter.

The daughter of Kasha and Shawa Oshana, Shushan Oshana Wright grew up in the mountains of Kurdistan. Her parents, Nestorians who converted to Evangelical Christianity in the 1840s, worked with Protestant missionaries among the Nestorian community. In her young adulthood, Oshana Wright spent time in the United States receiving training at Ferndale Seminary in Norwalk, Connecticut before returning to Iran....