Cricket Fighting

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, my translator. He read:

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 private banquet room upstairs at the Luxurious Garden Restaurant in Minhang, an enormous industrial suburb in south-west Shanghai. Ask him anything you want, Michael said. But when I told Mr Wu that I didn’t understand the Three Reversals, he looked straight though me without a smile.

Michael, a Shanghai college student, had signed on to work with me as a translator but had quickly become my fully-fledged collaborator. Together we were learning about cricket fighting, a centuries-old pastime that seemed to be undergoing a revival. We followed crickets all over the city and found ourselves in places new to both of us as we met traders, trainers, gamblers, event sponsors, entomologists, all kinds of experts. By the time we sat down to eat in the Luxurious Garden, we already knew two of the Reversals and wanted only to confirm the third. But like so many other people we met in Shanghai, Mr Wu wanted us to know how much deeper the world of Chinese cricket fighting was than we, or even he, could ever hope to understand.