Boursicot reported that it is only when he had the opportunity to leave his dull job that Shi Pei Pu told him the "Story of the Butterfly" again with an added twist that he, Shi Pei Pu, had been a woman masquerading as a man all his life to prevent her father from taking a second wife and shaming her mother who had two older daughters. Upon Shi's birth, this fiction was created. Boursicot accepted the lie, their affair began, and all that came after ensued.