Shi pei pu biography

It began with a glance, as so many love stories do. Soon, the wheels were in motion for happily ever after – until they not only came to a screeching halt, but fully derailed.

Pei Pu meanwhile never confirmed what exactly his/her/their gender identity was – but it was likely fluid. It was a small gig, but one that would allow him to live out his travel dreams on the exotic stage of ‘the Orient’. But Boursicot was no Bond, and understanding who he was before he moved to China is crucial to understanding how he became such a prime target for a honeypot trap…

Boursicot, who now lives in a nursing home in his native Brittany, was a provincial boy with daydreams of the Amazon jungle.

It wasn’t a hard task for him. The real shock, however, came when a court-ordered physical examination proved that Pei Pu not only had male sexual organs, but that the young Du Du had been sold to the Chinese government by his poverty-stricken family to play the role of Bouriscot and Pei Pu’s child. Shi later showed Shi Du Du to Boursicot, a four-year-old child that Shi insisted was their son who had been born to him.

Shi and his adopted son were brought to Paris in 1982, after Boursicot was able to arrange for them to enter France.

At first, things went smoothly – Pei Pu was welcomed as “Monsieur Shi” and given opportunities to perform in theatre and on French TV, becoming a bit of a celebrity:

The Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire became suspicious of Bouriscot and Pei Pu’s relationship, questioning them and ultimately bringing them both to trial in 1986 for espionage.

Butterfly about the Boursicot-Pei Pu scandal. She was witty, and spoke fluent French. After completing high school, Shi enrolled at the University of Kunming, where he studied literature and French. Joyce Wadler would later attribute Boursicot's belief that Pei Pu was a woman to Pei Pu's unique ability to retract his own testicles, which, combined with the manipulation of his own penis, created the illusion of labial lips and a clitoris and allowed for shallow penetration.

In 1965, Shi claimed to be pregnant and was able to use a baby boy called Shi Du Du (later called Bertrand by Boursicot and his family) who had been bought from a doctor in the Xinjiang province of China.

Boursicot, upon discovering the truth of their relationship, attempted suicide by slitting his throat but survived.

They met at an embassy reception and shortly began a relationship. Thus, when Boursicot arrives, he’s fascinated by what he sees as a new, neutral gender norm: short hair (for men and women) is the rage, and the plain “Mao Suit” is the country’s new uniform. In police custody, Shi explained to doctors how he had hidden his genitals to convince Boursicot that he was a woman, and explained that Shi Du Du, their purported son, had, in fact, been bought from a doctor in the Xinjiang province of China.

He wasn’t very articulate, and didn’t have many friends – let alone lovers. The Peking Opera embodied all of that romance, opening up a world of stories, songs and characters unlike anything he’d known back in Brittany.