Liaison: the Gripping Real Story of the Diplomat Spy and the Chinese Opera Star - Hardcover

Joyce Wadler

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553092138 ISBN 13: 9780553092134

Publisher: Bantam, 1993

Synopsis

The story behind the Broadway play M. Butterfly chronicles the strange love affair between a French diplomat in Beijing and a mysterious opera singer, a liaison in which the Frenchman is unaware that his lover is a man. 30,000 first printing. $30,000 ad/promo.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

High-class retelling of the real-life affair behind the mistaken-sex plot of M. Butterfly. Wadler wrote the poignant My Breast (1992). Bernard Boursicot sought adventure and, in the early 60's, wound up clerking for the French embassy in Beijing as a 20-year- old virgin who'd detached himself from some distasteful homosexual episodes as a schoolboy. In China, he met Shi Pei Pu, a small, mysterious, and apparently male singer who'd played women's roles with the Beijing Opera. After many months of shared lunches and dinners, Pei Pu revealed to Bernard that he was actually a woman. His anxiety-ridden parents had raised him as a boy, he said, and, in unisex Mao clothes, it had been easy to pass as a man. Slowly, Bernard fell for Pei Pu, then began having sex with her/him, usually in the dark but not always. According to both, this was passionate sex, and, 18 years later, Bernard still thought Pei Pu a woman despite the singer's affairs with other women. When the two were arrested in Paris for spying (Bernard had fallen under the spell of Mao's Little Red Book and performed some innocuous spying for China so he could stay with Pei Pu and care for his supposed son by the singer), doctors proved that Pei Pu was a man. How had the guileful Pei Pu duped Bernard for so long? Well, the answer convinces but won't be revealed here, since Wadler (who badgers Bernard in several interviews reprinted throughout the text) passes through several explanations before arriving, on her last page, at the real trick used by Pei Pu.... Compelling and faintly bittersweet. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs--not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal

What better recipe for a nonfiction best seller than the combination of bizarre sex and espionage that makes this book irresistible? In 1964, Bernard Boursicot, a French embassy clerk in Peking, fell in love with Shi Pei Pu, an androgynous Peking Opera singer, who was actually a man pretending to be a woman disguised as a man! This Baroque story of deception casts Boursicot as a bisexual fool who dabbles in espionage; Shi Pei Pu as sexual magician who conjures up a Eurasian "son," the supposed fruit of their union; and a large number of assorted lovers, friends, and relatives. The basis for the hit Broadway play M. Butterfly , it may be read both as pure theater and as a study in sexual deconstruction. Unfortunately, Wadler is unduly obsessed with the purely prurient aspect of a story she tells very well, and her journalistic voyeurism finally verges on peep-show pornography. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/92.
- Steven I. Levine, Boulder Run Research, Hillsborough, N. C.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0553092138
• ISBN 13: 9780553092134
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 321