The author was only a child when he first entered a Chinese theater. Very often he merely stood beside the stage and stared with wide-open eyes at what was going on. Since then he has been through many changes, however, first impressions are not easy to erase. These fragments of opera stories that he has collected in this volume have preserved to a great extent those indelible earliest impressions. Because of this, friends who come into contact with this great, exotic and realistic art for the first time may find these writings candid and sincere but not presumptuous.
