Qian Zhongshu
In 1980, the literary critic and translator David Hawkes said of "Leaf in the Storm" that it is "by no means a bad novel," but it "seems to me inferior to "Fortress Besieged" [by Qian Zhongshu]—not only because it has not the same hard intelligence, but also because in "Leaf in the Storm" Lin Yutang's much vaunted-humour seems for once to have deserted him." Parts of the novel, Hawkes continued, "reread today like wartime propaganda," a shortcoming Hawkes attributed to the fact that it "owes much of its background to the newspapers, which are strong on major horrors but have little to say about the boredom and innumerable petty privations which make up the everyday reality of war."