Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  Dr. Li grew up in Shanghai, and like other men of his generation whom I met, his early fascination with crickets had been sparked and nurtured by an older brother. He describes passing the large (now long-gone) cricket market at Cheng Huang Miao every day on his way to school in the late 1940s; he remembers using his pocket money to buy crickets; he fondly recalls the circle of insect friends (chong you) that grew around him, boys his own age and, from time to time, the adults who would stop to play with them.

  At twenty, he graduated from the Shanghai Film Academy and was assigned to the Shanghai Science and Education Film Studio, where he developed his skills as a cameraman and animator. In the mid-1980s, he was appointed professor of photography and animation arts at Jiao Tong University.

  We didn’t talk about this, and he doesn’t discuss it in his writing, but the history of Shanghai during this period is well known: the falling out of favor of the cosmopolitan city that had given birth to the Chinese Communist Party; the never-implemented plan to dismantle the metropolis and disperse a population rendered suspect by the city’s decadent colonial past; the forced closure of hundreds of its factories, schools, and hospitals and the relocation of 2 million of its residents during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; the city’s precipitous decline and stagnation until its belated incorporation into Deng’s reform strategy with the Pudong policy of 1992; its spectacular return to eclipse Hong Kong, looking out across the East China Sea not only toward the West but toward Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.19

  And all the while, Li Shijun cultivated his passion for crickets. He married, raised a family, carried out his responsibilities, advanced his career, expanded his cricket-loving circle, and refused to gamble. He told the story of how he would wander his Shanghai neighborhood seeking a cricket partner, someone willing to pit his insect against his own, but to do so without staking money. Time after time he was rebuffed. He offered to fight simply “for exercise,” just for practice, but no one would place his animal at risk without potential reward. He returned home dejected, embittered by the “poor condition of the world around him.” It was then that his wife, seeing his distress, made herself his special chong you, and there, alone in their apartment, together they fought crickets.20

  This was the early 1980s, as the restless wake of the Cultural Revolution gave way to the new turbulence of reform. Cricket fighting was already experiencing the stirrings of a revival that would bring teams of enthusiasts from Jiao Tong and Fudan universities for intervarsity competitions at Dr. Li’s apartment, where his wife and daughter would prepare lavish banquets (as they did for Michael and me) and nurture a sort of cricket salon under the professor’s patronage and sponsorship, a salon of real friends, he wrote, not the kind of friends one makes through gambling, who fall out over money and become strangers forever. Unlike those gamblers who travel together, collect together, fight together, but keep their own knowledge secret from one another, these cricket lovers share their experience. They are a circle of constant friends united by their love for crickets, a circle of men among whom he is the acknowledged big brother.

  I can’t shake Dr. Li’s image of himself and his wife in their Shanghai apartment, refugees from the deterioration they sensed all around them yet on the cusp of a florescence in the activity they love, which is fueled not by a return to the elite traditions of cricket culture he values so highly but by a relaxing of moral codes and a rising tide of both surplus income and financial desperation, a rich matrix for the regeneration of gambling, the source of so much of Dr. Li’s anxiety. And this is all deeply ironic for the professor, as well as disturbing and perhaps disorienting, because for Li Shijun the care and combat of crickets is a matter of yi qing yue xing, which corresponds to something like the cultivation of moral character, the elevation of one’s self and, by extension, of society as a whole.

  Both in person and in his writings, the professor is direct. At the end of his book Fifty Taboos of Cricket Collecting (don’t buy a cricket whose jaws are shaped like the character , don’t buy a cricket with rounded wings, don’t buy a cricket with just one antenna, don’t buy a cricket that is half-male, half-female, and so on), he remarks that it is no mystery that society looks down on cricket fighting. Whereas at the university he teaches in a suit and tie, at the insect market, surrounded by “low-level people,” he is compelled—for fear of appearing ridiculous—to wear slippers, T-shirt, and shorts like everyone else. The lack of cultivation—evident in the smoking, cursing, and spitting all around him—is not simply a personal matter: “If you want others to treat you with respect you must first act decently,” he insists.21

  Nor is it merely a question of deportment. The circle he is creating is both a refuge and an example. There is, he says, a crisis of civility in Chinese society, and cricket fighting, with its long history as a cultivated art, is a discipline, a spiritual road, the ideal vehicle for the cultivation and elevation of the self. With its traditions, knowledge, and scholarly demands, cricket fighting is a rare practice, more akin to tai chi than mahjong. But it is a practice debased by gambling. How nightmarish that an activity so elevated has become the vehicle of such degeneration.

  Campaigns against gambling have been a feature of the People’s Republic since the liberation. But despite periodically aggressive policing and especially since the post-Mao reforms, the party has had little success in controlling its expansion. Unlike the attempt to outlaw mahjong, which failed during the 1980s, the assault on crickets has been indirect, paralleling policy during the Ming and Qing dynasties, when imperial prohibitions ran up against the emerging professional network of urban cricket houses and legislation targeted gambling rather than crickets.22

  Even during the Cultural Revolution, cricket fighting wasn’t formally banned. However, as Master Fang and others recalled, one way or another it was driven to the margins. Except for small children, no one could find time for crickets; even when lives remained relatively intact, adults were too busy attending meetings. But there was no ambiguity about gambling. It was violently disavowed as a feudal evil, a vice with particularly tenacious roots in Chinese society. And it was through its association with gambling and elite corruption that cricket fighting suffered—through its affinity with a complex of indulgences marked as male (sex, drugs, drink, easy money; luxuriance, hedonism, or whatever gesture might be possible in its direction). In other words, crickets suffered through their association with social evils that—like the cricket fighting on which they were both parasitic and enabling—were distinguished by their cultural and historical depth, by what was understood to be their profound Chineseness.

  Despite the uncompromising public line, party people I talked with were pragmatic about the anti-gambling campaigns. Journalists and scholars, they responded to the issue as engaged intellectuals, debating whether gambling was a product of poverty and would thus wither away as income increased (an argument shadowed by anxieties about escalating inequalities) and whether its recent resurgence was due to the explosive combination of higher disposable income and chronic underemployment resulting from the shuttering of state enterprises. Cricket fighting had a peculiar status in this debate. Thoroughly contaminated by gambling, it was also the source of a new and highly valued commodity: traditional culture. With the flush of money and a giddy sense of a physical world disappearing before their eyes, a new nostalgia seemed to be gripping the burgeoning urban middle class. New value was being conferred on vernacular architecture, classical painting, antique ceramics, scholars’ rocks, teahouses, and other material histories. One sign was the vigorous trade in counterfeit imperial antiques for the domestic market. If there was ever a moment to promote those elevating elements of cricket fighting to which Dr. Li had devoted so much of his life, this was it.

  We were surrounded by abundance. The delicious sixteen-course lunch prepared by Dr. Li’s wife and daughter sat mostly uneaten. Dr. Li told us about his scheme to promote development in Henan Province by helping local farmers
enter the Shanghai cricket market in competition with traders from Shandong, Anhui, and elsewhere. He was spending significant sums of his own money on this project and investing a great deal of his considerable energy, even traveling to the countryside to donate equipment and teach villagers how to distinguish among different insect species. The village he was working with was on the same latitude as Ninyang, and he had every reason to expect its crickets to be as strong as Shandong’s. The pilot project had produced promising results. It was now only a question of convincing the buying public.

  I wondered how the market in crickets could survive without gambling cash. I thought of all those men at Boss Xun’s casino, the intense gazes, the sudden silence, the blur of crickets under the lights, the explosive laughter. I thought how, despite all its evident dangers, it is gambling—with its illicit pleasures, its secure masculinity, its justification of obsession, its profound cultural rooting, its incentive to commodification, and its underwriting of an entire informal economy—that has kept cricket fighting alive, and it is Boss Xun and his associates who, like it or not, are the guardians of this world and its dynamic traditions.

  Gambling isn’t just economic, I said. There’s a culture of gambling, and a sociality, and a living history, too, of gambling on anything, not only on crickets—though crickets are especially fantastic for this! Gambling is as much “traditional culture” as cricket raising. Even Jia Sidao was a gambler! To which Dr. Li replied evenly that the government’s target was not gambling itself but the social problems it generated. Anyway, he could never gamble no matter how exciting it might be. How could he take his friends’ money? Such behavior was inappropriate for a scholar. And look, he said, the problem is not small gambling, a few coins here and there to spice up a game. The problem is when people wager their house, their possessions, gamble away their lives. Of course, we could never eradicate something so deep in society. But over time, by example, an alternative could grow. And he sketched a vision of a future Shanghai in which a cricket fight was much like a cross between a sports tournament and a pet show—much like the world of Japanese stag and rhinoceros beetles, in fact—a world in which restrained but enthusiastic people, young and old, studied and collected, formed clubs and shared knowledge. He was already promoting such events, he said, and they were attracting his students from Jiao Tong University.

  And much later, long after lunch was over, after I had learned so much and enjoyed such kind hospitality, after most of the other guests had left, after we had talked for several hours about his project in Henan (crickets can help those people escape their poverty, he had said), about his idea of reforming cricket classification (it’s too complicated even for the experts, he had said with much amusement), and about his belief that far from dying out (as all my other insect friends thought it was), cricket culture was in fact thriving among the young, after the long journey home across this ever-growing city, and after Li Jun had quizzed me up and down on the bus to the metro station, only then, back in my downtown hotel room, with its view across the sparkling cityscape, did Michael and I reconstruct the day’s conversations and—remember that by now we both felt ourselves to be so deep in the world of Shanghai cricket fighting and were both somehow so invested in its realness—he said, and I had to agree, that although he had great respect for Professor Li, this idea of reforming cricket culture through example would lead to two types of cricket fighting: one would be elite, aboveground, and organized around well-funded official championships; the other would be underground and illegal, it would involve gambling, it would continue to be treated with fear and disdain, and it would have better crickets, better matches, and more excitement. And, Michael said, he thought that Dr. Li and his friends understood this, that they were far from naïve. And, he continued in that wise and generous way of his, that was okay. They just want their world, he said, and that’s not necessarily such a bad thing.

  7.

  Centuries before anyone thought of placing crickets in pots and provoking them to fight with yard grass, their evocative singing and their presence in the home cast an annual blow against loneliness and gave them a special place in Chinese life. In this poem from Shijing (The Book of Songs), an anthology compiled around 3,000 years ago, it is the cricket that seeks out human company and finds its way into the intimate heart of the household:

  It is in the wild in the seventh month,

  Under the eaves in the eighth month,

  In the house in the ninth month,

  and under my bed in the tenth month.23

  There is a deep, deep history of cricket friends—people who become friends through crickets and crickets who themselves become friends with people. It wasn’t only Xiao Fu who told me how his crickets were his friends and how he tries to make them happy, how he can tell when they are happy and how they can tell that he cares, how, as Jia Sidao suggests, he chews sesame seeds before feeding them to his insects just as mothers sometimes chew their babies’ food before feeding it to them. But crickets are friends, not babies. And that is something cricket lovers (unlike some pet lovers) are unlikely to forget. Because, as well as the Five Virtues, they have the Three Reversals.

  You remember that the Five Virtues show the similarities between crickets and people? They are five classical qualities (loyalty, courage, trustworthiness, and so on), exemplary virtues that can be found in ancient heroes and toward which ordinary people (like you and I) can aspire. The Five Virtues reveal a deep ontological connection between people and crickets, a shared being in the world that forms the basis for the attachments and identifications that, along with gambling, have kept cricket fighting alive for so many centuries. The Three Reversals recognize the complementary reality: they acknowledge the definitive difference between crickets and people.

  The First Reversal: A defeated cricket will not protest the outcome of a fight; he will simply leave the arena without bluster or complaint.

  The Second Reversal: A cricket requires sex before a fight and performs better for the stimulation it provides; rather than having an enervating effect on athletic performance (as, according to this reversal, it does in men), pregame sex among crickets promotes physical prowess, mental focus, and a fighting spirit.

  The Third Reversal: Crickets have sex with the female on the male’s back, a position functionally impossible for people (without complicated equipment). Moreover, as the entomologist L. W. Simmons points out in what we might think of as a decisive commentary on the Third Reversal, “Since the female must actively mount a courting male there is little if any opportunity for forced matings by males.”24

  Like the Virtues, the Reversals are both empirical and symbolic, derived from close observation and pointed at things bigger than themselves. Psychological, physiological, and anatomical—they are systematic, comprehensive, and economical. When taken together, the Virtues and the Reversals offer a way of forming relationships with other beings that accepts that they are both like and unlike ourselves, not in some generalized abstract way, but in quite particular respects that provide grounds for connections and empathies as well as points of utter disconnection. I don’t think it matters whether you’re committed to crickets through gambling or you’re committed to ending gambling in the name of a higher culture. I think the Virtues, the Reversals, the Flaws, the Taboos, and all the other entryways into the world of cricket fighting take you to a place governed by the laws of us/not us, where similarity/difference simply persists as a fact of existence and does not require resolution. I think this is just as it should be, even if there is little else that can be relied on to persist right now in Shanghai.

  The last time I saw Boss Xun, he invited me to travel with him to Shandong next year. We would spend two weeks there collecting crickets, he said. He knew everyone and had excellent relations with the local authorities. His offer tugged at me strongly. It would be good to experience the happy times once more. It would be good to be around cricket friends, human and insect, again. It would be good to live, just f
or a while, in that space of acceptance where things are simultaneously one thing and another. Michael was enthusiastic too. Perhaps, he said, we could spend the entire season with the crickets. That, we agreed, would really be something to come back for.

  Heads and How to Use Them

  1.

  I missed the crickets. I missed their friends. I opened The New York Times and missed them even more.

  Flies, fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, the experimental animal par excellence, arguably more important even than rats or mice in the history of modern science. These haunting video stills were shot in 2006 in a neuroscience lab in southern California. The flies are fighting, and the U.S. government—channeling its money through the National Science Foundation—is betting on the winners.1 The arena is a telegenic blue.

  Herman A. Dierick and Ralph J. Greenspan, lead researchers at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, are breeding fruit flies for aggression. Flies, they tell Nicholas Wade of the Times, are militantly territorial in the wild but lose their edge in captivity. Professors Dierick and Greenspan fill pots with fly food and encourage individual males to defend them. They call this the “arena assay.” They rank the flies on an “aggression profile” based on four criteria: the frequency of fighting, the rapidity with which the animals engage, the amount of time a pair spends in combat, and the fervor of the battle (“the number of high-intensity elements such as holding or tossing”).

  Dierick, Greenspan, and their colleagues separate the most belligerent fighters to use as breeding stock. After twenty-one generations, they report aggression-profile differences of more than thirtyfold compared with their control population of standard laboratory flies. “Because aggression levels are likely to be strongly influenced by the brain,” they decapitate generation 21. They grind the heads. They want to know if genes expressed in the fighters’ brains can be correlated with the newly aggressive behavior. “Dr. Greenspan said an understanding of how genes set up circuits to govern behavior would be of broad significance in understanding what makes either flies or people tick,” writes Wade.2