Madame Butterfly was a man

In the 1988 Broadway play and the 1993 film "M. Butterfly," Bernard Boursicot was depicted as a high-ranking diplomat and Shi Pei Pu as a beautiful female opera singer who met in 1964. In fact, Mr. Boursicot was a 20-year-old high school dropout who had finagled a job as an accountant at the newly opened French Embassy in Beijing. His few sexual experiences had been with male schoolmates, and he was determined to fall in love with a woman, he wrote in his diary.

Shi Pei Pu was 26 when they met, delicate and charming. He lived as a man and taught Chinese to the diplomatic wives. He told Mr. Boursicot that he had been a singer and a librettist in the Beijing Opera. One perfect night in the Forbidden City Mr. Shi told Mr. Boursicot a story no romantic could resist: Mr. Shi said he was a woman who had been forced to go through life as a man, because her father required a son. A short time later, the men became lovers, although the sex, Mr. Boursicot would later say, was fast and furtive, always carried out in the dark.\

When the affair was discovered by the Chinese authorities, Mr. Boursicot passed them French documents, first from the embassy in Beijing and later from his posting at the consulate in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Mr. Boursicot spent most of his life outside China and was romantically involved with men and women. On his rare visits to Shi Pei Pu, sexual contact was circumscribed. On one visit, Mr. Shi presented him with a 4-year-old boy, Shi Du Du, who Mr. Shi said was their son.

In 1982, Mr. Boursicot — then living openly with a male companion, Thierry Toulet — was able to arrange for Shi Pei Pu and Shi Du Du to live with him in Paris. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu were arrested for espionage. Mr. Shi first told the police he was a woman, but he admitted the truth to prison doctors, showing them how he hid his genitals.

Mr. Boursicot, hearing that Shi Pei Pu was a man and always had been, sliced his throat with a razor blade in prison.

In 1986, Mr. Shi and Mr. Boursicot received six-year sentences for espionage. They were pardoned a year later. Mr. Shi is survived by Shi Du Du, who lives in Paris and who, Mr. Boursicot said, has three young sons.

Although Mr. Boursicot and Mr. Shi occasionally spoke over the years, relations were strained. Mr. Boursicot said that they last spoke a few months ago and that Mr. Shi told him he still loved him.

Mr. Boursicot, who is 64 and has been living in a nursing home in France while recovering from a stroke, showed no sadness when he learned of Mr. Shi’s death, on Tuesday, in a telephone interview.

Asked if he had any sadness at all, Mr. Boursicot said: “He did so many things against me that he had no pity for, I think it is stupid to play another game now and say I am sad. The plate is clean now. I am free.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/world/asia/02shi.html?partner=rss&emc=rss