Cricket Fighting

2.
We first met Mr Wu in the back room of a factory social club full of men playing card games. He had jagged stitches in his palm and winced when we shook hands. He was a little nervous: although cricket fighting is legal, gambling is not, and recent crackdowns in the city have even led to executions. Nonetheless Mr Wu was willing to help and promised to take us to a serious cricket fight. A few nights later he led us to a warren of run-down apartments blocks, through an open front door and into a brightly lit 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 the cricket casino we were going to. Boss Xun not only provided the premises, he handled the local police, guaranteed a referee to arbitrate the fighting and the cash, and made available a secure and well-organized public house in which the animals were deposited before the fight. For all this, he and his partner, Boss Yang, took five per cent 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 full member of this underworld, and this, he later explained apologetically, was why he was nervous.

Boss Xun, however, was relaxed and welcoming. He wore track pants, a T-shirt, plastic flip-flops and a gold chain; his grey hair was close-cropped and his nails carefully manicured. ‘Please feel at home,’ he said. 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 assured him. But it was hard to be unobtrusive. Boss Xun insisted on seating us at the head of the long, narrow table next to the referee, with the best possible view of the crickets and directly opposite the only door. The casino was basic — a bare whitewashed room — and its simplicity was a measure of transparency. As the gamblers entered, they could take in everything, the room and its occupants, at a glance. A few nights earlier Michael and I had watched a TV exposé of a cricket gambling den complete with hidden cameras and pixellated interviewees, so 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 by a white cloth on which sterile implements were laid out on either side of the clear plastic arena.

This was a secure zone — the windows were stuffed with thick cushions to keep noises in and noses out—but it was also a place of entertainment. Boss Xun worked the room with self-contained charisma. The referee called the bets with finesse, moving everything along swiftly, and managing friction with boisterous humour, despite the large amounts of money flying across the table.

‘Who will call first?’ he began, addressing the two trainers, one on either side of him. Their motions were slow and deliberate. They pulled on white cotton gloves supplied by the house, lifted the lids from the pots to examine their animals, stirred them with long straws of yard grass, and delicately transferred them to opposite sides of the arena. One of the trainers was clumsier than the other; he faltered as he eased his fighter out of the transfer case, nervous in the knowledge that most of the bets are placed 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, eager for that moment when the animal’s spirit, power and discipline would be revealed.

For several minutes, the bets mounted on one animal, then the next, stopping only when the second pile of cash in front of the referee had grown to equal the first. Men with fistfuls of 100-yuan notes clamoured to have their bets acknowledged by the referee or, once the house bets closed, called odds to entice others with whom they might make side bets. The referee’s voice boomed above the rest, building up the crickets and the stakes. Some men offered a loud commentary on the animals and the wagers. Others simply watched.

And then at the instant the referee directed the trainers to prepare their crickets the room fell silent. The two trainers began again to gently stroke their animals (back legs, abdomen, jaws) with the yard grass. The crickets didn’t move. If you were close enough, you could see the beating of their hearts. The referee called, ‘Open the floodgate!’ and lifted the panel that divided the arena. The silence intensified. It was obvious that these animals were far more combative than any Michael and I had seen before. A sudden assault, a dart, a lunge at an opponent’s jaw or leg, and the room emitted a sharp, involuntary gasp.

This was a typical gambling house in the industrial zone, Mr Wu told us later as everyone poured out of the building into the empty streets of the housing estate. Downtown the sponsors rent hotel suites and hand-pick their high-rolling punters, and at those places the minimum bet is 10,000 yuan — a low but not unusual annual wage in Shanghai — and total stakes can exceed a million. Tonight in Minhang, though, the referee opened the bidding with modest encouragements: ‘Bet what you like, we’re all friends here, even 100 is fine tonight.’ Still, at one point during the evening, as the stakes climbed over 30,000 yuan, a gambler who had travelled here from Nanjing showed his hand for the first time and, with no change of expression, almost, it seemed, absent-mindedly, tossed a bankroll of 6,000 yuan into the middle of the table.

He watched impassively as the referee delegated an observer to count and recount the cash until the gate was lifted in the arena and the crickets aggressively locked jaws, wrestling, and flipping each other over, again and again, in a blur of bodies. And then — as if abruptly losing interest — the animals disengaged, walking away into opposite corners and refusing their trainers’ attempts to entice them back into the fray. Even the referee’s effort to stimulate them by eliciting singing from the two crickets kept for this purpose in pots beside the arena had no effect. It was a draw, a rare outcome that provoked a contemptuous clucking from Mr Wu, who stage-whispered to us that really good crickets fight to exhaustion, that though athletic and well-matched these animals were poorly trained.

If the crickets appear to tire, if they hang back or if one turns away, the referee lowers the gate to separate the fighters, resets the sixty-second timer, and invites the trainers to tend to their insects. Like corner men at a boxing match, the trainers try to restore their charges’ fighting spirit but often one cricket simply slumps, his opponent puffs up and sings, and the referee calls an end to the fight. Then, all at once, the cash again begins to fly in the casino — large notes out to the winners, five per cent in small bills coming back to the referee.

The winning cricket is returned carefully to his pot, ready for the journey home or back into the public house to prepare for another fight. The loser, no matter how valiant, or how physically unscathed, has finished his career. The referee collects him in a net and drops him into a large plastic bucket behind the table, for release ‘into nature’, everyone told me. It was okay, Michael added, I shouldn’t worry, the animal would be all right, the curse on anyone who harms a defeated cricket guaranteed it.