Part 2 (1/2)

The system is fearsomely complex. It begins with body color. Jia identifies and ranks four body colors: first yellow, then red, black, and finally white. The authoritative Xishuai.com cricket-lovers' website adds purple and green-for which cricket people always use the ancient term qing- qing-to this list but does not rank them. By contrast, most cricket experts I talked to in Shanghai describe only three colors: yellow, qing qing, and purple. Yellow crickets are reputed to be the most aggressive of the three but not necessarily the best fighters because qing qing insects, though quieter, are more strategic and-according to the annual ill.u.s.trated list of cricket champions-include a greater number of generals. insects, though quieter, are more strategic and-according to the annual ill.u.s.trated list of cricket champions-include a greater number of generals.

Color is the first criterion by which crickets are divided and it confers an initial ident.i.ty that, as we can see, is held to correspond to differences in behavior and character. Below these gross distinctions, however, is a further set of divisions into individual ”personalities,” whose total number is often put at seventy-two.8 To entomologists like my friend Professor Jin Xingbao, these personalities relate only to individual-and therefore taxonomically insignificant-variations among crickets that belong to a very limited number of formal species. In the Linnaean terms that she prefers to use, most of the fighting crickets kept in Shanghai are either To entomologists like my friend Professor Jin Xingbao, these personalities relate only to individual-and therefore taxonomically insignificant-variations among crickets that belong to a very limited number of formal species. In the Linnaean terms that she prefers to use, most of the fighting crickets kept in Shanghai are either Velarifictorus micado Velarifictorus micado, a black or dark-brown species that grows to seven tenths of an inch and is highly territorial and aggressive in the wild, or, in smaller numbers, the equally bellicose V. aspersus. V. aspersus.9 Because it identifies breeding populations and evolutionary relations.h.i.+ps, Professor Jin's type of cla.s.sification is essential if, for example, the goal is conservation. However, I suspect she would agree that it's not much use to cricket trainers seeking ways of identifying potential champions. Their cla.s.sification system is based on an agglomeration of numerous physical variables, complex cl.u.s.ters of characters.10 Length, shape, and color of the insect's legs, abdomen, and wings are all systematically pa.r.s.ed, as is the shape of the head-current manuals might include seven or more possibilities-and differences in number, shape, color, and width of the ”fight lines” that run front to back across the crown. Experts also consider the energy of the antennae; the shape and color of the animal's ”eyebrows” (which should be ”opposite” in color to the antennae); the shape, color, translucence, and strength of the jaws; the shape and size of the neck plate; the shape and resting angle of the forewings; the sharpness of the tail tips; the hair on the abdomen; the width of the thorax and face; the thickness of the feet; and the animal's overall posture. The insect's ”skin” must be ”dry” (that is, it must reflect light from inside itself, not from its surface); it must also be delicate, like a baby's. The cricket's walk must be swift and easy; it should not have a rolling gait. In general, strength is more important than size. The quality of the jaws is decisive. Length, shape, and color of the insect's legs, abdomen, and wings are all systematically pa.r.s.ed, as is the shape of the head-current manuals might include seven or more possibilities-and differences in number, shape, color, and width of the ”fight lines” that run front to back across the crown. Experts also consider the energy of the antennae; the shape and color of the animal's ”eyebrows” (which should be ”opposite” in color to the antennae); the shape, color, translucence, and strength of the jaws; the shape and size of the neck plate; the shape and resting angle of the forewings; the sharpness of the tail tips; the hair on the abdomen; the width of the thorax and face; the thickness of the feet; and the animal's overall posture. The insect's ”skin” must be ”dry” (that is, it must reflect light from inside itself, not from its surface); it must also be delicate, like a baby's. The cricket's walk must be swift and easy; it should not have a rolling gait. In general, strength is more important than size. The quality of the jaws is decisive.

Innumerable manuals are dedicated to the identification of especially desirable crickets. Books are filled with color photos of such admirable personalities as Purple Head Golden Wing, Cooked Shrimp, Bronze Head and Iron Back, Ying Yang Wing, and Strong Man That n.o.body Can Harm. But as Professor Jin points out, these are ideal types, individual crickets that display prized combinations of traits and are unlikely to recur in precisely this form.

Though from a natural science perspective, this method may appear to be characterized above all by imprecision and taxonomic confusion, it is closer to zoological cla.s.sification than it might at first appear. The cricket-lovers' system is a practical one directed at the identification of signs of fighting prowess and the circulation of these signs within the cricket community in a spirit of democratic scholars.h.i.+p. It is also, in its own way, a moral system, a manual of a perhaps archaic masculinity (though it would be foolish to a.s.sume that because these characteristics are valued in crickets, they are therefore admired in men). The mastery of such knowledge can require decades of dedicated application, both book study and hands-on learning. It is comprehensive and also intuitive. It is largely inaccessible to a novice. Scientific cla.s.sification, though substantially more recent and directed to different goals, shares many of these features, and it, too, is based on type specimens-the first individuals of a given category to be collected and described, the specimen against which all subsequent individuals will be measured. Moreover, in both systems, so long as individual variation falls within given parameters, it is disregarded.

Taxonomy doesn't simply require judgment; it is itself a set of judgments. And it is the key to the early-autumn task of acquiring the best possible insects. As Michael and I were told repeatedly, judging a cricket's quality requires deep knowledge. Nonetheless, judging is only one of three rudiments of cricket knowledge, and for Master Fang it is of less significance than the work of training, which fills the two-week mid-autumn period between bai lu bai lu, when collecting ends, and qiu fen qiu fen, which marks the official start of the fighting season.

Master Fang tells me that the trainer's task is to build on preexisting natural virtues to develop the animal's fighting spirit (dou xing). This indispensable quality is revealed only at the moment the insect enters the arena. Though a cricket might look like a champion in all respects, though the judgment of its physical qualities may be correct, it can still turn out to lack spirit in compet.i.tion. This, Master Fang insists, is less a matter of the individual cricket's character than a function of its care. It is the task of the trainer to build up the cricket's strength with foods appropriate to its stage of growth and individual needs, to respond to its sicknesses, develop its physical skills, cultivate its virtues, overcome its natural aversion to light, and habituate it to new, alien surroundings. Fundamentally, says Master Fang, a trainer must create the conditions in which the insect can be happy. A cricket knows when it is loved, and it knows when it is well cared for, and it responds in kind with loyalty, courage, obedience, and the signs of quiet contentment. In practical terms, this is a quid pro quo because a happy cricket is amenable to training, and as its health, skill, and confidence increase under the trainer's care, so too does its fighting spirit.

And as he was explaining all this to me, describing the s.e.xual regimen he provides, outlining the many symptoms of ill health that one must be alert to, displaying the purified water, the home-cooked foods, the various pots, explaining that everything relies on communication and that the yard gra.s.s is the ”bridge” between him and the insect (that, in other words, they understand each other in a language beyond language), Master Fang removed the lid from one of his pots and, in emphatic response to my increasingly unimaginative line of questioning, took his yard gra.s.s straw and barked orders at the cricket as if at a soldier: ”This way! That way! This way! That way!” And the insect-to Michael's and my real astonishment-responded unhesitatingly, turning left, right, left, right, a routine of exercises that, Master Fang eventually explained, increases the fighter's flexibility, makes him limber and elastic, and shows that man and insect understand each other through the language of command as well as beyond it.

Training is a matter of nutrition, hygiene, medicine, physical therapy, and psychology. Each of these is addressed by Jia Sidao in the Book of Crickets Book of Crickets, and like the principles of judging a warrior, each has been pa.s.sed down through the generations of cricket lovers and amended, supplemented, and revised during its travels. Nutrition, hygiene, and medicine now rely both on principles of Chinese medicine-on the requirement to correct imbalances of the five elements with therapeutic baths and appropriate foods-and on the principles of scientific physiology, that is, on the need to find not only cooling and heating foods but also substances rich in, for example, calcium, targeted at the insect's exoskeleton.

And that's what Master Fang told me the last time we met. A wild cricket is always superior to one raised from eggs in captivity, he said. And when I asked him why, he answered that the wild animal imbibes specific qualities from the soils of its birth. I at once thought I was hearing him identify a quality in wildness that I also like to hold on to, an ineffable, holistic quality that escapes molecular logic. Hearing this response reminded me of Igarape Guariba, that village in the Amazon invaded by yellow summer b.u.t.terflies, and how when Seu Benedito felt ill and prepared remedies for himself, he would leave the mixture outside, near the river, for several days in a capped soda bottle to absorb the nighttime air. That impressed me greatly because to me the bottle was sealed and nothing could enter, but to Seu Benedito those days under the changing sky were a vital ingredient, as essential to the mixture as any of the roots and leaves. But when I asked Master Fang what exactly it was that the cricket absorbed from his environment-Did it get strong by fighting against a difficult climate or inhospitable soil? Were there perhaps atmospheric spirits that fortified its own fighting spirit?-his response was entirely without mystery: the best crickets come not from the harshest soils but from the most nouris.h.i.+ng; their characteristic physical powers are a result of their early nutrition; you should look at the soil before you collect; you should know the quality of the earth from which the animal comes; you should administer baths and supplements accordingly.

And as sometimes happened when the topic became more specialized, Michael and I found ourselves in an area in which the experts disagreed. Xiao Fu, an antiques dealer, recently returned from his annual cricket collecting trip to Shandong, explained that the northern crickets are strong precisely because of the harshness of the dry environment against which they have to battle. Mr. Zhang, who generously spent a day taking us to cricket markets in Shanghai, impressing us with his considerable bargaining skills and sharing his substantial knowledge of cricket culture, also preferred wild crickets to home raised but explained that the wild insects absorb their spirit and ”soul” from the elements in which they are raised, from the earth, air, wind, and water.

Some months later, when I read Jia Sidao's Book of Crickets Book of Crickets, I discovered that the terms in which Jia described the ecological relations.h.i.+p between land and insect were difficult to specify, that he left room for all these views, but that, like most of the people we talked to about this, he, too, insisted on the importance of the initial environment to the insect's fighting quality. His discussion of this point won approval from his modern editor, who, though quick to criticize unscientific lapses in the 800-year-old text, interjected only that there was in fact more ecological variation in the crickets' range than Jia had known of and then, no doubt wisely, declined to arbitrate.

Crickets leap into Shanghai in early August and stay until November. Michael often referred to these three months as the ”happy times,” and it took me a while to realize he wasn't translating this term literally from our conversations with cricket people but extracting it from the pleasure he heard in their accounts. It was an evocative translation, far better than my very English ”cricket season.” Even if it ignored the anxieties of what for many was the highlight and sometimes the very purpose of the year, ”happy times” captured those irrefutable delights of cricket culture: the play and the camaraderie, the expertise in a world of arcane knowledge, the intimate connection with another species, the willing abandonment to obsession, the security of an erudition that reached back many centuries, and of course, the circulation of money and its possibilities.

The happy times are tethered to the rhythms of the lunisolar calendar, which are themselves tied to the lives of insects. Li qiu Li qiu, the nominal start of autumn, in early August, is also the time when the crickets in eastern China undergo their seventh and final molt. They are now mature and s.e.xually active, and males are able to sing and-as their color darkens and they gain strength over the following days-ready to fight.

It is now that the happy times officially begin. I haven't seen it myself, but it's easy to visualize from the stories: whole villages out in the moonlit fields; young, old, men, women, flashlight bound to the head, listening for the crickets' song, searching around tombstones, poking the earth and brickwork with sticks, throwing water, pinning the insects like startled rabbits in the beams of light, gathering them in small nets, trapping them in sections of bamboo, taking care not to damage their antennae, carrying them home, ordering them by their diagnostic qualities. In a few days of night- or daytime collecting, a family can ama.s.s thousands of crickets, ready to be sold directly to visiting buyers or to be carried to local or regional markets.

Li qiu rings alarm bells throughout China's eastern cities. In Shanghai, as well as in Hangzhou, Nanjing, Tianjin, and Beijing, it is the signal for tens of thousands of cricket lovers to head for the railway stations. They pack the trains to Shandong Province, which, during the twenty years in which crickets have become scarce in Shanghai, has established itself as the regional collecting center, the source of the finest warriors, known for their aggression, resilience, and intelligence. rings alarm bells throughout China's eastern cities. In Shanghai, as well as in Hangzhou, Nanjing, Tianjin, and Beijing, it is the signal for tens of thousands of cricket lovers to head for the railway stations. They pack the trains to Shandong Province, which, during the twenty years in which crickets have become scarce in Shanghai, has established itself as the regional collecting center, the source of the finest warriors, known for their aggression, resilience, and intelligence.

Who knows how many answer the crickets' call and make the ten-hour journey from Shanghai to Shandong? Mr. Huang, feathering a client's hair in his storefront salon, tells us it can be near impossible to find a rail ticket during this period. Xiao Fu, seated in the doorway of his antiques stall, showing us his collection of rare cricket pots-presenting me with a pair from Tianjin (thick walled and pocket-size to warm the cricket close to your body)-estimates that he is 1 of up to 100,000 Shanghainese who go. Others reckon that 500,000 people arrive from eastern China during this four-week period and that upward of 300 million yuan flows into the local economy from the Shanghainese alone.11 Who travels to Shandong? Always the same answer: if, like Mr. Huang and Xiao Fu, you habitually bet more than 100 yuan on a fight, you make the journey; if, like Mr. Wu, you bet less, you wait for the cricket markets in Shanghai to fill with insects from the provinces and make your selections there. Xiao Fu tells us that he is like most cricket lovers, just a small-to-middling gambler. But the 3,000 to 5,000 yuan he spends each year in Shandong seems sizable next to the 12,000 yuan he brings in from antiques. Still, there are millionaire cricket lovers taking the train these days who are willing to slap down 10,000 yuan to scoop up a single general. So this year Xiao Fu did what more and more visitors do: he rented a car with his friends and toured the villages dotted throughout the countryside on the roads of Ninyang County, and he avoided the crowds in the main market at Sidian.

Often, I'm told, when buyers like Xiao Fu arrive in outlying villages, the first thing they do is pay five yuan for a table, a stool, some tea leaves, a thermos, and a cup. Then, within moments of settling down, they are besieged by villagers pus.h.i.+ng cricket pots under their noses, crying, ”Look at mine! Look at mine!” Some of the sellers have pricey, good-looking crickets, but others are children and elderly people with only the cheapest insects to sell.12 The more successful sellers establish and maintain connections to buyers, perhaps have them come to the village to trade with them, perhaps even have them lodge in their home. The visitors might be gamblers like Xiao Fu, or they may be Shanghainese traders looking to purchase in bulk. Or they might be wealthier farmers or small businesspeople from local towns and villages who have found ways to cross the far-higher entry barriers to sell on the markets in Sidian or Shanghai or both. Or perhaps they are Shandongnese who do business by selling insects to others-Shanghainese or Shandongnese-who sell them on the urban markets. While it's clear that for the village collectors who every year turn to crickets for direly needed cash income, this is a moment of real, though perhaps desperate, opportunity, it's also clear that those who prosper the most in this economy are those who have the most to begin with and that the cricket trade, a vital supplement to the rural economy in Shandong, as well as in Anhui, Hebei, Zhejiang, and other eastern provinces, is also an engine of social differentiation serving to deepen what are already widening chasms of inequality. The more successful sellers establish and maintain connections to buyers, perhaps have them come to the village to trade with them, perhaps even have them lodge in their home. The visitors might be gamblers like Xiao Fu, or they may be Shanghainese traders looking to purchase in bulk. Or they might be wealthier farmers or small businesspeople from local towns and villages who have found ways to cross the far-higher entry barriers to sell on the markets in Sidian or Shanghai or both. Or perhaps they are Shandongnese who do business by selling insects to others-Shanghainese or Shandongnese-who sell them on the urban markets. While it's clear that for the village collectors who every year turn to crickets for direly needed cash income, this is a moment of real, though perhaps desperate, opportunity, it's also clear that those who prosper the most in this economy are those who have the most to begin with and that the cricket trade, a vital supplement to the rural economy in Shandong, as well as in Anhui, Hebei, Zhejiang, and other eastern provinces, is also an engine of social differentiation serving to deepen what are already widening chasms of inequality.

Yet it's an insecure and destructive engine. Through the 1980s and '90s, as the cricket markets in Shandong took off, the county of Ninjing was the most popular destination for buyers. But after more than a decade of intensive collecting, the quality of the crickets began to decline noticeably, and Ninjing's preeminence was usurped by its neighbor Ninyang, which now markets itself as ”China's Sacred Fighting-Cricket Location.” In recent years, however, the overexploitation of crickets in Ninyang has forced local collectors (as well as visitors like Xiao Fu) to expand their range, so that they now comb the countryside and villages within a radius of more than sixty miles from their temporary bases. The pressure of unregulated collecting on the crickets is ”like a ma.s.sacre,” writes one contemporary commentator.13 Night hunting, which used to occupy villagers from nine in the evening until four in the morning, now takes them away from their homes until noon. Night hunting, which used to occupy villagers from nine in the evening until four in the morning, now takes them away from their homes until noon.

Just one month after li qiu li qiu, as warm August nights ease into cold September mornings and white dew appears on country fields, bai lu bai lu marks the end of the collecting season. Sensing the chill in the air, the crickets call a halt, heading back into the soil, digging down with their powerful jaws, weakening their most precious fighting a.s.set, and ruining their value as commodities. Carefully packing up their haul, the last Shanghainese retrace their journey home, though this time they share the trains with Shandongnese traders off to stake their claim in the city's cricket markets. marks the end of the collecting season. Sensing the chill in the air, the crickets call a halt, heading back into the soil, digging down with their powerful jaws, weakening their most precious fighting a.s.set, and ruining their value as commodities. Carefully packing up their haul, the last Shanghainese retrace their journey home, though this time they share the trains with Shandongnese traders off to stake their claim in the city's cricket markets.

At Wanshang, the largest flower, bird, beast, and insect market in Shanghai, these traders, mostly women, sit in rows in the center of the main hall with their crickets laid out neatly before them in small pots with lids cut from tin cans. Around the market's edges, permanent stalls are occupied by Shanghainese dealers, also newly returned, their clay pots arrayed on tables, the insects' origin chalked up on a blackboard behind them.

The same pattern is repeated at cricket markets throughout the city. At Anguo Road, in the grim shadow of Ti Lan Qiao, Shanghai's largest jail, and again in what Michael called new Anguo Road-rapidly opened in a disused lot following a police raid-Shanghainese sellers sit at tables while traders from the provinces, squatting on stools, lay out their pots on the ground in their own distinct areas. This visible geography mirrors pervasive tensions in Shanghai and throughout contemporary China between urban residents and what is officially known as the ”floating population,” a vast number of people to whom the government denies urban residency status (with its a.s.sociated permit and social benefits) but who anyway fill the lowest-paying and most dangerous jobs in the construction, service, and sweatshop sectors.14 Even though the provincial traders at these markets don't plan to stay in Shanghai and even though they are likely to be relatively prosperous in rural terms (some are farmers; some are year-round traders of various products; one man I talked to dealt in cell phones), once in the city they are simply migrants, subject to hara.s.sment, discrimination, and expulsion. Nonetheless, for those who've made it here, these are potentially happy times too. No matter that unemployment is up, gambling is down (after a series of police crackdowns), and business accordingly slowed, most expect to do well. By minimizing their expenditures-traveling with relatives, going home infrequently, carrying as much stock as possible when they return, and sleeping in cheap ”bas.e.m.e.nt hotels” close to the market-provincial traders can make considerably more in these three months than they will in the entire rest of the year. At least that's what traders-including an impressively organized woman from Anhui who said that last year she took home a full 40,000 yuan-told me again and again.

Shanghainese traders don't sell female crickets. Females don't fight or sing and are valued only for the s.e.xual services they provide to males. It's the provincial traders who deal in these, selling them in bulk, stuffed into bamboo sections in lots of three or ten, depending on their size (bigger is better) and coloring (a white abdomen is best). Females are cheap, and at a first glance that takes in these traders' apparently subordinate situation in the market, it seems they sell only cheap animals, female and male.

The signs in front of the Shandongnese traders say ten yuan for each male, sometimes two for fifteen. The buyers file past their pots, browsing the rows with an air of detachment, occasionally lifting the lids to peer inside, taking the gra.s.s brush, stimulating the insect's jaws, perhaps s.h.i.+ning a flashlight to gauge the color and translucence of its body, trying to judge not only its physical qualities but also that less tangible and even more critical fighting spirit. Despite their studied indifference, they're often drawn in, quickly finding themselves bargaining for an insect priced anywhere between 30 and-if the buyer is a genuine big boss-as much as 2,000 yuan. Only children, novices like me, the elderly, the truly petty gamblers who play crickets for fun, and bargain hunters who believe their eye is sharper than the seller's will buy the cheap crickets, it seems.

But how do you judge an insect's fighting spirit without seeing it fight? Groups of men crowd around the Shanghainese stalls. Michael and I aren't tall or short enough to see between shoulders or legs. Eventually, someone moves aside to share the view: two crickets locking jaws inside their tabletop arena. The stallholders tend to the animals like trainers at a real fight. But they're seated in chairs, pots piled around them, and as the match progresses, they deliver relentless patter, inciting interest like auctioneers, talking up the winner and attempting to raise its price.

This is a risky sales strategy. No one buys a loser, so the defeated are quickly tossed into a plastic bucket. And if, as often happens, the winner isn't sold either, he has to fight again and may be beaten or injured. The seller relies on his ability to inflate the winner's price enough to compensate for the collateral losses. But the woman from Shanghai who eagerly waves us over as she spoons tiny portions of rice into dollhouse-size trays, tells us that the Shanghainese insist on watching the crickets fight before they put their money down, that they like to s.h.i.+ft the risk to the seller. It is starting to look as if the divisions between metropolitan and provincial are expressed not only in the spatial arrangements (which make the market look like an allegorical tableau of society at large) but also in the distinctive selling practices of the different groups, so that buyers stroll in and out of two distinct worlds as they browse, two worlds with explicit boundaries marked by distinct codes, aesthetics, and experiences, two racialized worlds perhaps.

”Shandongnese don't dare fight their crickets,” the woman continues in a tone that seems congruent with the discriminations that surround us. She is lively and straightforward, generous too, inviting us to share her lunch and giving me a souvenir cricket pot, disappointed that I won't take the insect as well, enjoying initiating us and not about to be silenced by her irascible husband no matter how many times he looks up from his warriors to sound off in our direction. She's expounding on her neighbors, the Shandongnese traders. ”They sell their crickets as brand-new to fighting,” she says, and then-so casually it almost slips past, and it is only thanks to Michael's quickness and to the violence of her husband's reaction that I realize it-she is telling us that crickets circulate throughout the market, unconstrained by social and political division. She explains that they pa.s.s not only from trader to buyer but also, without prejudice, from trader to trader, from Shanghainese to Shandongnese and from Shandongnese to Shanghainese. And as they travel through these crowded s.p.a.ces, they gain and even recover value; they're born again: losers become ingenues, cheap crickets become contenders; they change their character, their history, and their ident.i.ty. Caveat emptor.

But how fascinating and even inspiring that the politics of racial difference diagrammed so concretely in this highly spatialized marketplace and conforming so fully (too fully, in a game of double bluff, it turns out) to social expectation is not only an expression of a dismal social logic but also a technology of commerce that creates lively crosscutting dependencies and solidarities. And this thought led me again to the animals who make all this possible, confined to their pots, traveling like slaves really, like chattels, making their way between stalls and pitches, completing circuits, breaching boundaries, and forging new connections, gathering new histories and new lives, unable to prevent themselves from minimizing their captors' exposure to loss, unable to avoid collaborating in their own demise.

In the city, the happy times have no center; they are everywhere, wherever there are crickets. On working-cla.s.s street corners, groups of men cram themselves around an arena, watching the battles unfold. In the newspapers, it's high culture and low life, elite sponsors.h.i.+p and police raids. The happy times bring the gambling houses to life and make possible cultural events and neighborhood tournaments. They light up the stores that sell cricket paraphernalia, the elaborate implements that every fighting cricket and every cricket trainer needs: tiny food and water dishes (maybe in sets with coordinated designs of Buddhist deities), wooden transfer cases, ”marriage boxes” with room for one male and one female, various grades of gra.s.s and whisker, nudging brushes made of duck down, tiny long-handled metal trowels and other cleaning implements, large wooden carrying cases, pipettes, scales (both weighted and electronic), technical manuals, specialized foods and medicines, and of course, pots in an enormous variety, some old (and often fake), some new, most of clay but some of porcelain, some large, some small, some with inscriptions, mottoes, or stories, some to commemorate special cricket events, some with intricate images, some simply plain.

The happy times are here again. While they last, the money flows, the people travel, and the insects circulate. It's a period of possibility, an opening in which many projects unfold and many lives are changed. It's an intense period but a short one. It's the length of a cricket's adult life.

Would we see cricket gambling before I left Shanghai? We'd watched crickets fight in Master Fang's museum, and we'd seen traders ”test” them at Wanshang and other markets. But it was all starting to feel like Hamlet Hamlet without the Prince. Hadn't gambling and crickets been a.s.sociated since the earliest records? Hadn't Jia Sidao written for his gambling friends? Didn't without the Prince. Hadn't gambling and crickets been a.s.sociated since the earliest records? Hadn't Jia Sidao written for his gambling friends? Didn't cai ji cai ji, the term for crickets in Shanghainese, mean ”collect fortune”? Wasn't it gambling that made the markets possible and kept cricket fighting alive when so much else considered ”traditional culture” was disappearing? Wasn't it gambling that made these transactions crackle and our conversations pop?

Master Fang, by no means a moralist, did not agree. He said: Gambling debases cricket fighting. And: Cricket fighting is a spiritual activity, a discipline of man and animal. And: Most gamblers know nothing about crickets and have little interest in them; they might as well be betting on mahjong or soccer.

It wasn't only experience that made Master Fang's words authoritative. He spoke with a persuasive combination of purism (his master's rigor) and enthusiasm (his unaffected pleasure in the crickets themselves and the dramas they create). Nonetheless, there seemed something artificial about gambling's absence. Despite its active exclusion, it always found its way into the tabletop talk. It was as if-for the trainers and audience, if not for the animals-these nongambling fights were merely rehearsals.

But perhaps it was simply timing that made it seem this way. Two weeks later, when the tournament in Qibao reached its final stages, there would be scores, if not hundreds, of people watching the fights in the courtyard of the museum on closed-circuit TV, and as I write this, I remember a Sat.u.r.day spent in cricket markets with Mr. Zhang, who described how his uncle fought crickets for honor, not money, in the early years of the twentieth century, how in those days the trainers of champions were proud to win red ties, and how, he continued, telescoping the century, cricket fighting began to involve big money only with Deng's reforms and the spread of disposable incomes. Even in Qibao, though, it was hard to enforce purity and hard to imagine that there was no betting taking place in the wings. The discussion at the museum was all about gambling (winners, losers, champions, bets), with Master Fang as caught up in the gossip as everyone else. Even he admitted that gambling made fights more exciting, that it gave them a raw, compulsive edge.

Still, it didn't look as if Michael and I would find out for ourselves. It was a too-illegal, too-closed world, and our connections just weren't good enough. Mr. Huang, the hairstylist, didn't want to take us. I had just arrived in Shanghai and was wilting under the twin debilities of jet lag and brutal humidity. Michael and I hadn't yet figured out our translation rhythm, and we made a distinctly unsparky team. The conversation in Mr. Huang's salon was awkward, and although he was informative and more than courteous, he was wary of taking our relations.h.i.+p further. ”It wouldn't be convenient,” he said decisively.

Xiao Fu, our second contact, was more enthusiastic. His brother, Lao Fu, was an old cla.s.smate of Michael's father, and the four of us quickly hit it off. Xiao Fu was knowledgeable about crickets and generous with his expertise. He brought a selection of his insects and an array of implements to our meeting at his stall and patiently explained many aspects of his pa.s.sion. Like Mr. Huang, Xiao Fu faced hards.h.i.+ps in his life, but he was lucky that in Lao Fu he had a brother who was also a rock, contributing his own expert knowledge of Chinese antiquities to the business and fulfilling a promise to their mother to keep his younger sibling safe and strong. It wasn't Xiao Fu's decision not to take us to a fight. The other members of his circle vetoed the proposal and left him with the awkward task of letting us down gently.