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Most existing reception studies on English translations of Chinese fiction were done with convenience samples (international students in China or American students in a Chinese visiting scholar’s contact class) and cloze tests to check their reading comprehension or the material’s readability, which leaves no or limited space for the subjects to air their view on the cultural aspects of the translated text. The present study fills the gap by adopting a two-stage design: 1) an open-ended response narrative written by the subjects while or immediately after reading, from which recurrent cultural issues were identified and saved for 2) a post-reading questionnaire comprising close-ended questions on cultural images. A number of 30 subjects were recruited based on their interest in the English translations of five traditional Chinese stories and their readiness to complete the two stages of the survey. Two prominent cultural images – the frog and the phoenix – were identified from the response narratives collected from Stage 1 since they were consistently mentioned by all the subjects. While the image of the frog in Chinese culture is predominantly positive as a guardian of the crops, the “boy turns into a frog” plot in one story was received differently by the subjects. In one instance, it “falls with a heavy thud to my ear because in our culture an evil sorceress changes a boy into a frog as punishment” (quoted from one subject’s reading response narrative), whereas in another it was considered “enjoyable, esp. as the Americans have so many muscular and strong heroes, when in fact a hero can be a simple person who does something great” (quoted from narratives). In a similar vein, while in Chinese culture the phoenix is beautiful, auspicious and to be worshipped, the “phoenix turns into a young lady” plot in another story proved surprising to most subjects, for whom the phoenix was predominantly known as “a bird that burns up and then is recomposed from the ashes to live again – hardly in any sweet way” (quoted from narratives). The frog and the phoenix concerns were therefore extracted from the responses and served as the core elements based on which the questionnaire for Stage 2 was designed. The questionnaire survey was aimed to producing a more general tendency in interpreting the image of the frog/phoenix in the subjects’ own culture, in the translated story, and in their previous knowledge of the Chinese culture, in order to complement the qualitative results from Stage 1 in case the narratives were too personal and locally interpreted. Results from Stages 1 and 2 combined to show as much diversity as intersection and varying degrees of openness in receiving the translated stories and the cultural images therein. However, both diversity and intersection proved to be unexpected to general native Chinese readership, which means a significant amount of intercultural communication was taking place not only in the direction of English readers reading translated Chinese stories, but in Chinese readers being informed of English readers’ responses. (493 words)