The Conversion of Sum Loo is a short story by Willa Cather

Willa Cather

Willa Seibert Cather was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours , a novel set during World War I...

. It was first published in Library

Library (journal)

-Overview:The magazine was only published over the course of six months, until it ran out of funds.Willa Cather published five original short stories , sixteen articles and seven poems...

in August 1900.

Plot summary

After his first wife dies without giving him the progeny his recently deceased father strongly wished him to have, Sum Chin, who grew up in China and now lives in San Francisco, decides to get married to the daughter of a friend he had in China. They have a child together, Sum Wing, and baptise him. The child dies, and Sum Chin becomes very mournful; this was his last chance of living up to his patronym. His wife also keeps away from other people. Once, Sister Hannah follows her into a joss house

Joss house

A Shenist temple or Chinese folk temple is a place for worshiping the variety of indigenous Chinese shen from Chinese folk religion and Chinese mythology....

 and sees her tear away pages from the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

.

Characters

• Sum Chin, a trader of 'Chinese
  China
  Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
  
   bronzes and bric-a-brac in San Francisco'. He grew up in Nanjing
  Nanjing
  ' is the capital of Jiangsu province in China and has a prominent place in Chinese history and culture, having been the capital of China on several occasions...
  
  , where he liked to read Chinese literature
  Chinese literature
  Chinese literature extends thousands of years, from the earliest recorded dynastic court archives to the mature fictional novels that arose during the Ming Dynasty to entertain the masses of literate Chinese...
  
  .
• Sum Loo, Sum Chin's wife.
• Sister Hannah
• Norman Girrard, a theological student at the Mission of the Heavenly Rest. He liked to do charcoal
  Charcoal
  Charcoal is the dark grey residue consisting of carbon, and any remaining ash, obtained by removing water and other volatile constituents from animal and vegetation substances. Charcoal is usually produced by slow pyrolysis, the heating of wood or other substances in the absence of oxygen...
  
   drawings in his youth. Later, he took to drinking absinthe
  Absinthe
  Absinthe is historically described as a distilled, highly alcoholic beverage. It is an anise-flavoured spirit derived from herbs, including the flowers and leaves of the herb Artemisia absinthium, commonly referred to as "grande wormwood", together with green anise and sweet fennel...
  
   and doing profane paintings.
• Te Wing, a 'purchasing agent' from Canton
  Guangzhou
  Guangzhou , known historically as Canton or Kwangchow, is the capital and largest city of the Guangdong province in the People's Republic of China. Located in southern China on the Pearl River, about north-northwest of Hong Kong, Guangzhou is a key national transportation hub and trading port...
  
  . He is Sum Loo's father.
• Sum Wing, Sum Chin and Loo's child, who dies soon after getting baptised.

Literary significance and criticism

The Conversion of Sum Loo is a rewriting of A Son of the Celestial

A Son of the Celestial

A Son of the Celestial is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published on 15 January 1893 in The Hesperian.-Plot summary:In San Francisco, Yung and Ponter share their penchant for both Sanskrit and opium. When Yung fails to understand Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Ponter blames the...

.

External links

• Full Text at the Willa Cather Archive