The novel Eighty-One Dreams 八十一夢 was Zhang Henshui’s foremost contribution to the patriotic literature of the War of Resistance against Japan, criticizing the political and social corruption of the Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 regime. Soft surreal transitions and narrative shifts faithfully reproduce the logic of dreams; sharp reporting exposes contemporary social problems; characters and motifs from traditional Chinese fiction and history satirize the conduct of the war. A deft mixture of the popular style of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School with the innovations of May Fourth modernism, Eighty-One Dreams is a window on China’s educated classes, in its own time and still today.

Zhang Henshui 張恨水, pen name of Zhang Xinyuan 張心遠 (1895–1967), was probably China’s most popular novelist during his lifetime. Born in Jiangxi province, he began working as a reporter in 1917. In 1924, he finished his first novel, heavily influenced by the romantic Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School 鴛鴦蝴蝶派 then in vogue. In the 1930s, his popularity reached new heights with the serialization of his best-known novel Fate in Tears and Laughter 啼笑因緣. In 1949, he published Reminiscences of A Writing Career 寫作生涯回憶, a literary memoir, and thereafter concentrated his writings on historical themes.

Simon Schuchat 舒克德 is a retired American diplomat with over fifteen years of experience in Greater China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, and Hong Kong. In the late 1970s, he was a Foreign Expert at Fudan University in Shanghai. He did graduate work in premodern Chinese literature at Yale and Harvard universities. His translations of Tang and Song prose and poetry have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, as has his own poetry, which has also been published in four collections.