To find that, you must turn to Joyce Wadler’s riveting real-life story Liaison (321 pages. Bantam. $22.95). In Hwang’s fiction, the beguiling seductress appears dressed as a woman. The truth is stranger still. In Wadler’s reportage, we learn that when 20-year-old Bernard Boursicot first encountered the 26-year-old playwright and former opera performer Shi Pei Pu in Beijing in 1964, Pei Pu was dressed as a man, and no one presumed he was anything but. As the two became friends, the wily, ethereal Pei Pu revealed his deepest secret: he was really a woman, raised since birth as a boy. Only by having a son would his parents be able to stay together; otherwise, his father would be forced to take a second wife. Boursicot, a virgin at the time, swallowed the story whole. He recast himself as Pei Pu’s savior and lover. When they made love-an act always controlled by Pei Puhe chalked up her sexual reticence to Oriental modesty. And, as the French doctors sent to examine Pei Pu discovered, he had the ability to make his testicles ascend into his body cavity and tuck his penis back, creating the illusion of female genitalia.
What Pei Pu thought–and what his role was in persuading Boursicot to spy for the Chinese–remains mysterious. He refused to talk. “Liaison” is Boursicot’s wild, pitiable story. He is an infuriating mixture of romantic gallantry and self-serving egotism, a naive and sentimental lover who thought he was playing a role in “Doctor Zhivago” only to discover that he was the straight man in a boulevard farce.
