Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  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 associated 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 harassment, 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 “basement 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 sexual 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 grass brush, stimulating the insect’s jaws, perhaps shining 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 shift 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 pass 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 spaces, 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 identity. 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-class 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 sponsorship 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 grass 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 wit
h 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.

  4.

  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 without the Prince. Hadn’t gambling and crickets been associated since the earliest records? Hadn’t Jia Sidao written for his gambling friends? Didn’t 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 Saturday 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 relationship further. “It wouldn’t be convenient,” he said decisively.

  Xiao Fu, our second contact, was more enthusiastic. His brother, Lao Fu, was an old classmate 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 passion. Like Mr. Huang, Xiao Fu faced hardships 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.

  In the end it was Mr. Wu, fulfilling an obligation to a friend of his who was also a friend of a friend of mine in California, who made the arrangements. He met us on a dark street corner opposite the model ball bearing factory in the Minhang Heavy Industrial Zone, folded himself into our minuscule Chery QQ taxi, led us to a warren of rundown apartments blocks, through an open front door, and into a side room just big enough for a TV, a fish tank, and a gold plastic love seat.

  Mr. Wu was close with the father of Boss Xun, the sponsor of a cricket casino here. Boss Xun not only provided the premises but also handled the local police, guaranteed a referee to arbitrate the fighting and the cash, and made available a secure and well-organized public house. For all this, he and his partner, Boss Yang, took 5 percent of the winnings. Mr. Wu was a cricket lover of the first order and, we would find out, a gifted judge of cricket form, but he was only a small gambler and not a participant in this underworld. It was this discomfort, he later explained apologetically, that accounted for any erratic behavior.

  Boss Xun, though, was relaxed and welcoming. Track pants, T-shirt, plastic flip-flops, and a gold chain, gray hair close-cropped, nails carefully manicured, extra-long and tapered on thumbs and pinkies. “Please feel at home,” he said. “Ask me anything you like.” But Mr. Wu was chain-smoking and on edge. I remembered the instructions he’d given us in the cab: no smoking during the fight, no alcohol, no eating, no cologne, no scent of any kind, no talking, no noise of any kind. “We will be like the air,” Michael had assured him.

  But it was hard to be unobtrusive. With what I discovered was characteristic graciousness, Boss Xun insisted on seating us at the head of the long, narrow table next to the referee, the best possible view of the crickets and directly opposite the only door. The casino was basic—a whitewashed room stripped bare—and its simplicity was a measure of its transparency. As the men of Boss Xun’s circle entered, they could take in the scene at a glance, the entire room and all its occupants.

  A few days earlier, Michael and I had watched a TV exposé of a cricket-gambling den, complete with hidden cameras and pixelated interviewees, and we expected a darkened cellar full of shadowy dealings. But Boss Yang and Boss Xun’s casino was lit by an antiseptic fluorescent strip that threw its glare into every corner, and their table was covered with a white cloth on which sterile implements (yard-grass and mouse-whisker brushes, down balls, transfer cases, two pairs of white cotton gloves—all handled only by their staff) were arrayed with surgical precision on either side of the clear plastic arena.

  But transparency and security (windows stuffed with thick cushions to keep noises in and noses out) were perhaps just the enabling conditions. This was serious, but it was entertainment too, men’s entertainment. Boss Xun worked the room with his self-contained charisma, and the referee was engaging and quick-witted. He treated the men in the now-crowded casino with respect, called the bets with finesse, moved everything along swiftly, and managed friction with boisterous humor, all despite the large amounts of money flying across the table.

  “Who will call first?” the referee began, addressing the trainers on either side of him. Their motions were slow and deliberate, densely concentrated. They had pulled on the white gloves, lifted the lids from the pots to examine their animals, and aroused them with the yard grass, and now they were delicately transferring them to the arena. One man was a little clumsier, faltering as he eased his fighter out of the transfer case, sweating slightly, his hand trembling slightly, knowing that much of the betting happens before the animals are even visible, that many people wager on the trainers more than on the insects. As the crickets emerged under the lights, everyone leaned in, strained for the closest view, hungry for that moment when the animals’ spirit, power, and discipline would come into the open.

  For several minutes, the bets mounted on one animal, then on the next, stopping only when the second pile of cash in front of the referee had grown to equal t
he first. The packed and steamy room turned raucous. Men with fistfuls of 100-yuan notes clamored to have their bets acknowledged by the referee or, once the house bets had closed, called odds to entice others with whom they might deal laterally. The referee’s voice boomed above the rest, building up the crickets and the stakes. Some men loudly offered commentary on the animals and the wagers. Others simply watched. (And observing these men, Michael—without animus of his own but in an effort to convey to me the resonances that haunt the gambler’s world—recalled one of the scathing essays on political passivity and complicity that the great Lu Xun wrote during the turmoil of the 1930s. Michael couldn’t reproduce the exact wording, and I haven’t managed to find the text, but the gist was clear and, as he remembered it, sour too: We Chinese like to say we love peace, but in reality we like fighting. We like to watch other things fight, and we like to fight among ourselves.… Let them fight; we do not get involved, we just watch.)

  And then, at the instant the referee directed the trainers to prepare their crickets, silence snapped into place; the room seemed to hold its breath. The two trainers began again to stroke their animals gently with the yard grass (back legs, abdomen, jaws). The crickets remained motionless. If you were close enough, you could see the beating of their hearts.

  Eventually, the insects sang, indicating their readiness. The referee called, “Open the floodgate!” and lifted the panel that divided the arena. Around the table, postures stiffened, the silence intensified. And at once, it was obvious to Michael and me that these animals were far more combative than any we’d seen before, more—we had to say—warrior-like. They looked conditioned, ready. A sudden assault, a dart, a lunge at an opponent’s jaw or leg, and the room emitted a sharp, involuntary gasp. All the energy in this tightly packed space concentrated on this tiny drama. A singularity. And at that moment, I realized I was right there, and I looked at Michael squeezed in beside me and saw that he was too, everything focused on the insects.