Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  And my sickness was as nothing compared with that of others. Dora, young and strong, my best friend here, came that close to death. She, like Lene, had falciparum, the most dreaded, she told me. I’d been away when she took ill, and that absence gave her the chance later to narrate with the full melodrama that the crisis deserved. It was the três cruzes, three crosses, she said, though, like me, she had never quite figured out why it was called that. Um cruz, dois cruzes, três cruzes. Some people said it referred to the intensity of the infection. But the printed slip they had given both of us at the clinic in town had three Latin names (although there are really four Plasmodium protozoa that inhabit human hosts) and a space for a tidy little cross beside each. Mine had just one cross, and the box next to P. falciparum was unmarked. Lene and Dora both had three crosses, so one cross had to be inside the box for P. falciparum, the parasite that swims all the way to your brain.

  3.

  It makes little difference if you clear the vegetation around your house the way the leaflets tell you. It can even make it worse. This is the Amazon floodplain, for heaven’s sake; the houses are on the banks of the river, and when the tide falls, it leaves pools of standing water everywhere. For a few weeks each year, the mosquitoes are so thick in the air at dawn and dusk that everyone burns wood inside the house, hoping that the thick smoke will force the devils to leave. With streaming eyes, slapping ourselves repeatedly on thighs, arms, sides, even the face, hitting each other when we see one land, jumping around like Keystone Kops, we try to eat the evening meal but more often than not simply give up. It’s impossible to sit down or even stay still, and if the needle-sharp bites weren’t so painful, we’d probably find it comical. Within minutes we retreat to the safety of mosquito nets or cover ourselves with cotton blankets, frustrated, sore, hungry.

  In the city there are various contraptions for seeing off mosquitoes. But here, without electricity, there is only smoke. With no effective recourse, the insects exhaust us. I never talked to anyone about this, but those insects made me feel like an interloper. Not—as when I first arrived—an awkward intruder in the lives of the people who became my hosts (making me their parasite). Now, when we ran from the clouds of mosquitoes and the billowing smoke, together in our pain and annoyance, it was clear that we all were intruding on this landscape and its forms of life.

  4.

  Although P. malariae can make a home in a range of primates, falciparum and the others live in humans only. Between the female Anopheles mosquito and its parasitic protozoa, these are life cycles of awe-inspiring elegance, devastation, and persistence. In September 1658, Oliver Cromwell died from malaria he contracted in Ireland. Now Europeans know it only as a disease of the tropics, of poverty, distance, and underdevelopment, a disease without profit. According to the World Health Organization, malaria kills 1.5 million people each year. Thankfully, Lene was not one of them. At least, not then. At the health post, they gave her an injection and some tablets, and we took her back home, more slowly, less anxious.

  So many problems, so overwhelming, where even to begin? No nearby health post, no sanitation, insufficient food in summer, the insupportable inequalities of health, life expectancy, and well-being. And then the shame, so much shame, so much uselessness, the overwhelming boredom that drove this woman beyond restlessness and consigned her family to the margins of this margin. The day I went to say my final good-bye, Lene stayed inside the two-room wooden house with her daughters—the four preteen girls who cared for her. I sat outside with Marco on a tree trunk overlooking the creek and his field of maize. He drew on his cigarette and listened patiently as I lied for the last time, telling him about my journey and promising I’d come back to see them all again soon.

  Generosity (the Happy Times)

  1.

  On the way to the cricket fight, Mr. Wu slipped us a piece of paper. It looked like a shopping list. “More numbers,” said Michael. He read:

  Three reversals

  Eight fears

  Five fatal flaws

  Seven taboos

  Five untruths

  It was Mr. Wu’s answer to a question I’d asked him earlier that day in the smoke-filled, gold-papered private banquet room upstairs at the Luxurious Garden in Minhang, an industrial district in southwest Shanghai. But it wasn’t the answer we’d expected. Ask him anything you want, said Michael, and I thought we were all relaxed enough, too. Boss Xun and Mr. Tung, the charming gambler from Nanjing, were telling funny stories; tight-lipped Boss Yang was red-faced and expansive; we were toasting health and uncommon friendship. But when I told Mr. Wu that I didn’t yet understand the Three Reversals, he looked straight through me without a smile.

  Michael had taken time out from college in Shanghai to work as my translator. But he’d quickly become my full-fledged collaborator. Together, we were trying to find out as much as we could about cricket fighting and what everyone said was its revival. We spent our days running around the city, finding ourselves in places new to both of us, meeting traders, trainers, gamblers, event sponsors, entomologists, and all kinds of experts. By the time we sat down to eat in the Luxurious Garden, we already knew two of the Reversals and suspected the third, and my question was supposed to be an uncontroversial conversation starter. But Mr. Wu was having none of it. Like so many people we met in Shanghai, he wanted us to understand how deep was the world of Chinese cricket fighting—and how shallow were our questions.

  2.

  As everyone knows, the speed of urban growth and transformation in Shanghai is stunning. In less than one generation, the fields that gave the crickets a home have all but gone. Now, dense ranks of giant apartment buildings, elongated boxes with baroque and neoclassical flourishes, stretch pink and gray in every direction, past the ends of the newly built metro lines, past even the ends of the suburban bus routes. The spectacular neon waterfront of Pudong, the symbol of Shanghai’s drive to seize the future, is barely twenty years old but already under revision. I marvel at the brash bravery of the Pearl Oriental Tower, the kinetic multicolored rocket ship that dominates the dazzling skyline, and think how impossible it would be to build something so bold yet so whimsical in New York. Michael and his college-age friends laugh. “We’re a bit tired of it, actually,” Michael says.

  But they also know nostalgia. Only a few years ago, in what seems like another world, they helped fathers and uncles collect and raise crickets in their neighborhoods, among close circles of friends, in and out of one another’s homes and alleyways, sharing a daily life that the high-rise apartments have already mostly banished. Downtown, remnants of that life are visible in pockets not yet rebuilt or thematized. Sometimes, though, residents are merely waiting, surrounded by their neighbors’ rubble, holding out against forced relocation to distant suburbs as the government clears more housing, now for the spectacle of Expo 2010.

  Eleven miles from the city center and a crowded fifteen-minute bus ride from the huge metro terminus at Xinzhuang, the township of Qibao is a different kind of neighborhood. An official heritage attraction, a stroll through a past disavowed for its feudalism during the Cultural Revolution but now embraced for its folkloric national culture, Qibao is newly elegant, with canals and bridges, narrow pedestrianized streets lined with reconstructed Ming- and Qing-dynasty buildings, storefronts selling all kinds of snack foods, teas, and craft goods to Shanghainese and other visitors, and a set of specimen buildings skillfully renovated as sites of living culture: a temple with Han-, Tang-, and Ming-dynasty architectural features, a weaving workshop, an ancient teahouse, a famous wine distillery, and—in a house built specifically for the sport by the great Qing emperor Qianlong—Shanghai’s only museum dedicated to fighting crickets.

  All these crickets were collected here in Qibao, says Master Fang, the museum’s director, standing behind a table laden with hundreds of gray clay pots, each containing one fighting male and, in some cases, its female sex partner. Qibao’s crickets were famous throughout East Asia, he tells us, a product of
the township’s rich soil. But since the fields here were built on in 2000, crickets have been harder to find. Master Fang’s two white-uniformed assistants fill the insects’ miniature water bowls with pipettes, and we humans all drink pleasantly astringent tea made from his recipe of seven medicinal herbs.

  Master Fang has considerable presence, the brim of his white canvas hat rakishly angled, his jade pendant and rings, his intense gaze, his animated storytelling, his throaty laugh. Michael and I are drawn to him immediately and hang on his words. “Master Fang is a cricket master,” confides his assistant Ms. Zhao. “He has forty years’ experience. There is no one more able to instruct you about crickets.”

  Everyone at the museum is caught up in preparations for the Qibao Golden Autumn Cricket Festival. The three-week event includes a series of exhibition matches and a championship, with all fights broadcast on closed-circuit TV. The goal is to promote cricket fighting as a popular activity distinct from the gambling with which it is now so firmly associated, to remind people of its deep historical and cultural presence, and to extend its appeal beyond the demographic in which it now seems caught: men in their forties and above.

  Twenty years ago, everyone tells me, before the construction of the new Shanghai gobbled up the landscape, in a time when city neighborhoods were patchworks of fields and houses, people lived more intimately with animal life. Many found companionship in cicadas—“singing brothers”—or other musical insects that they kept in bamboo cages and slim pocket boxes, and young people, not just the middle-aged, played crickets, learning how to recognize the Three Races and Seventy-Two Personalities, how to judge a likely champion, how to train the fighters to their fullest potential, how to use the pencil-thin brushes made of yard grass or mouse whisker to stimulate the insects’ jaws and provoke them to combat. They learned the rudiments of the Three Rudiments, around which every cricket manual is structured: judging, training, and fighting.

  The irony is that despite the erosion of the popular base needed to guarantee its persistence, cricket fighting is experiencing a revival in China. Even as it loses out to computer games and Japanese manga with the young, it is thriving among older generations. Yet it’s an insecure return that few aficionados are celebrating. For even as the cricket markets flourish, the cultural events blossom, and the gambling houses proliferate, much of the talk is marked by the same anticipatory nostalgia, a sense that this, too, along with so much else about daily life that only a few years ago was taken for granted, is already as good as gone, swept away—not for the first time in recent memory—into the dustbin of history.

  Master Fang pulls an unusual cricket pot from the shelf behind him and runs his finger over the text etched on its surface. In a strong voice, he begins to recite, drawing out the tones in the dramatic cadences of classical oratory. These are the Five Virtues, he announces, five human qualities found in the best fighting crickets, five virtues that crickets and humans share:

  The First Virtue: When it is time to sing, he will sing. This is trustworthiness [xin].

  The Second Virtue: On meeting an enemy, he will not hesitate to fight. This is courage [yong].

  The Third Virtue: Even seriously wounded, he will not surrender. This is loyalty [zhong].

  The Fourth Virtue: When defeated, he will not sing. He knows shame.

  The Fifth Virtue: When he becomes cold, he will return to his home. He is wise and recognizes the facts of the situation.

  On their tiny backs, crickets carry the weight of the past. Zhong is not ordinary loyalty; it is the loyalty one feels for the emperor, the willingness to lay down one’s life, to not shirk one’s ultimate duty. Yong is not ordinary courage; it is, once again, the readiness to sacrifice one’s life and to do so eagerly. These are not simply ancient virtues; they are points on a moral compass, codes of honor. As anyone will tell you, these crickets are warriors; the champions among them are generals.

  The passage on Master Fang’s pot is from the unquestioned urtext of the cricket community, the thirteenth-century Book of Crickets by Jia Sidao.1 No mere cricket lover, Jia is remembered still as imperial China’s cricket minister, the sensual chief minister in the dying days of the Southern Song dynasty, so absorbed in the pleasures of his crickets that he allowed his neglected state to tumble into rack, ruin, and domination by the invading Mongols. The story is told by his official biographer:

  When the siege of the city of Xiangyang was imminent, Jia Sidao sat on the hill of Ko as usual, busying himself with the construction of houses and pagodas. And, as usual, he continued to welcome the most beautiful courtesans, streetwalkers, and Buddhist nuns as his prostitutes and to indulge in his routine merry-making.… Only the old gambling gangsters, looking for play, approached him; no one else dared peek into his residence.… He was squatting on the ground with his entourage of concubines engaged in a cricket fight.2

  The historian Hsiung Ping-chen points out that whatever this incident might say about Jia’s sense of responsibility and his personal rectitude, it also casts him as a man whose failings were at least irredeemably human and whose passion for crickets had a democratic stubbornness. From this point on, Jia “was enthroned as the deity in China’s game world,” she writes. “For centuries, his name liberally adorned all covers of books on crickets, call them collections, histories, dictionaries, encyclopedias or whichever title you wish, concerning catching, keeping, breeding, fighting, and, of course, gambling.”3

  There is much ambivalence surrounding these crickets, even in this one story. It’s so many things: a sorry tale in which crickets are just another expression of feudal decadence—the counterpoint to socialist modernity and the ready analog for contemporary injustices; a cautionary tale in which the moral effects of compulsive cricket fighting on individual and society are only too plain; a seductive tale in which the problem of desire—with its ever-present threat of addiction or other disorder—is part of the crickets’ magic, in the spell they cast over the most important man in the empire, a spell at once enthralling and enslaving. And more prosaically, it’s a cultural tale in the blandest sense, extending through the centuries, demonstrating the historical reach of crickets as socially important beings, as historical agents of the first degree.

  As if all that weren’t enough for one figure (who, of course, had another public career as a politician of considerable importance), there is the Book of Crickets, the very foundation of cricket knowledge, the mostly unnamed source to which everyone—Master Fang, Mr. Wu, Boss Xu—is referring when he tells me that this cricket culture is very deep knowledge, that it comes to us directly from the ancient books. And we can put this in another language to say simply that Jia Sidao’s Book of Crickets is not only the earliest extant manual for cricket lovers, it is also perhaps the world’s first book of entomology.4

  There are written records of people fighting crickets in China as early as the Tang dynasty (618–907). But it’s only with Jia’s Book of Crickets, with its detailing of intimate insect knowledge, that we can be sure that cricket raising and fighting had become a widespread and elaborate pastime. In fact, it was in the 300 or so years between Jia’s Southern Song dynasty and the mid-Ming dynasty that an organized market developed around these animals.5 This market reached its height during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), linking town and country in commerce and culture and stimulating an extraordinarily beautiful material culture of implements and containers.6 It eclipsed the crickets’ older role as singing companions, producing an extensive network of gambling houses with specialized workers and complex rules, an equally energetic but largely ineffectual series of state attempts at prohibition, and—as if it were the expression of Jia’s extravagant desire—sweeping up people of all ages in an activity that was accessible to all social groups and for several centuries was truly popular, as can be seen quite clearly in paintings and poetry and in classic stories like Pu Songling’s “The Cricket,” a tale of bureaucratic oppression and mysterious transformations, a tale of depth, subtlety, and
social criticism familiar to everyone I met in Shanghai, a tale that I was able to find in a used-book stall as a finely drawn comic from the early 1980s, a storytelling form once as popular in China as it still is in Japan and Mexico.7

  But let’s not lose sight of Jia Sidao just yet. His book is too important and too interesting. It ranges across philosophy, literature, medicine, and lore, as well as the knowledge that falls under today’s more restricted nineteenth-century model of natural history. In its scope it is reminiscent of other great early-modern insect compendia such as book VII of Ulisse Aldrovandi’s De animalibus (1602) and Thomas Moffett’s Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum (1634), the first European books dedicated entirely to insects (which, we might note, were not published until more than 300 years after the Book of Crickets).

  Jia’s ambitions were different from those of the European naturalists, and he writes not with their unrestrained desire to assemble and, in their own ways, possess the natural universe but with the more modest impulse to serve the community of gamblers, of which he was a part. Like Aldrovandi’s and Moffett’s volumes, the Book of Crickets is a work of compilation and systematization. But, whereas the impending post-Enlightenment disciplining of European natural philosophy doomed Aldrovandi’s and Moffett’s often-fanciful encyclopedias to long-term obscurity, Jia’s approach is so rigorously empirical and so calibrated to the demands of his fellow insect lovers that—notwithstanding the critical orientation to classical erudition that permeates today’s cricket community and the corresponding periodic complaints about Jia’s unscientific lapses—his detailed diagnostic key to the morphological characteristics of successful warriors is still the basis of cricket knowledge. When Master Fang and other experts tried to instruct me in the distinctions that allow them to judge a cricket’s fighting potential simply by observing the insect in its pot, they used the taxonomy that appeared first in Jia’s Book of Crickets and was modified and supplemented—but not overthrown—across the centuries.