Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses drug abuse, domestic violence, commercial sexual exploitation of children, and suicide.

The stories in Love in a Fallen City are selected from an earlier collection of Chang’s short stories and novellas entitled Romances. When the second edition of Romances was released in September 1944, Chang included this preface to the collection. The preface opens with Chang describing her desire to talk to the booksellers about how well her book is selling. She's eager to have her work published and appreciated. She puts this desire in context with the changing world of Shanghai, where she lived at the time. As she notes, “Our entire civilization—with all its magnificence, and its insignificance—will someday belong to the past” (1).

She continues by describing her interest in old-fashioned “Hop-Hop” folk opera, a traditional form of Chinese theater. Very few people want to go with her to the opera, but eventually, she finds someone to accompany her. She describes the play’s melodrama and the huqin music that accompanies it. In the show, there is a scene where a murdered man's ghost tells an official that his wife killed him. They follow the ghost to the widow, and she insists that her husband dropped dead of his own accord.