Chinese gender checkers
Published 03/31/2011
by Richard Dodds
http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=theatre&article=728The exotic fantasies that turned "The Mysterious East" into a familiar catchphrase have rapidly evaporated in the relatively brief time since M. Butterfly played to its first Broadway audiences in 1988.
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Gallimard was Hwang's fictionalized rendering of the real-life Bernard Boursicot, a low-level French diplomat stationed in Beijing in the 1960s. While Hwang has amped the story to accommodate broad cultural and political commentaries, M. Boursicot's actual story came already outfitted for a strange-but-true drama. In life as well as in the play, the French diplomat for two decades carried on an affair with, and passed state secrets to, a crossdressing Chinese opera singer whom he believed to be a woman.
