On Tuesday, 30 June 2009, Shi Peipu, known to the world as “M. Butterfly,” died in Paris at the age of 70, The New York Times reports. The biologically male Chinese opera singer and spy met Bernard Boursicot, a male homosexual member of the French consular staff, in 1964. Having convinced Mr. Boursicot, who was desperate to be heterosexual, that he was, in fact, a woman, Shi Peipu carried on a relationship with him for some time, eventually presenting him with a child, Shi Dudu, whom he claimed was their son.
In the 1980s, after Mr. Boursicot brought Shi Peipu and Shi Dudu to Paris, the former lovers were arrested under charges of espionage. In the process, it was revealed that Shi Peipu was, in fact, a man and that his “son” Shi Dudu was, by his own account, a Uyghur whom Shi Peipu had purchased from a poor family.
Shi Dudu, who remained devoted to Shi Peipu, lives in Paris, where he has three children.
Why do all the myriad ways of strange and shadowy people’s lives always seem to land up in Xinjiang? Various accounts assert, simply, that Shi Peipu selected a Uyghur or a “mixed-race” child from Xinjiang with blue eyes to stand in for the child of a European and a Han. I wonder how Shi Peipu, an individual with decidedly singular ideas about his or her own gender, came to the conclusion that Shi Dudu would be a convincing match for a child half in one world and half in another, Shi Peipu’s own bridge to a separate realm. The exotice internal Other of the Chinese world patterns all too well with the exotic outsider. I wonder how Shi Peipu came across Shi Dudu, where, and how. And I wonder if Shi Dudu’s assertion – “It was not that my mother did not love me. We were starving.” – is the belief of a very small boy, maybe one of the many half-Russian children of Xinjiang, sold as much out of shame as out of need.
Source:
3 July 2009, The New York Times: Shi Pei Pu, Singer, Spy and ‘M. Butterfly,’ Dies at 70 (and others)
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