I’ve received questions from several readers asking me about the actual Chinese characters for the names used in Butterfly Swords as well as the other books. I chose not to put in accent marks over the names in the actual text as I felt they would distract Western readers, but it may be of interest to readers who know Mandarin to see the pronunciations as I intended.

I do confess that I don’t know Mandarin (and would really like to learn!) . These are, to my knowledge, the appropriate names for the characters. If there’s a mistake here, please let me know so I can correct it.

Please note that the surname appears first. Also, the given name can be a single character or multiple characters. Thus the heroine of Butterfly Swords has a surname of “Shen” and her given name is “Ai Li”.

*A quick note to add that, Shen Leung is actually written down below as “Shen Liang” as Leung is Cantonese in usage. How does one handle dialect in such cases as these?