Cricket Fighting
3.
In Linnaean terms the fighting crickets kept in Shanghai are mostly Velarifictorus micado, a black or dark brown species that grows to 13–18 mm long and is highly territorial and aggressive in the wild, or, in smaller numbers, the equally bellicose V. aspersus. They appear in early August, at Li qiu, the division in the lunar calendar that marks the start of autumn and the moment when crickets in eastern China undergo their seventh and final moult. The crickets are now mature and sexually active, and males are able to sing and, as their colour darkens and they grow stronger, ready to fight. Li qiu is also the signal for tens of thousands of cricket lovers, from Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Tianjin and Beijing, to head for railway stations. They pack the trains to Shandong province, which has established itself over the past twenty years as the source of the finest fighting crickets. People told us that the travellers to Shandong usually bet more than 100 yuan on a fight. Small-time gamblers like Mr Wu are more likely to wait for the cricket markets in Shangahi to fill with insects from the provinces.
As the fighting season approaches its height in November the line of pots creeps further along the table and the contests stretch deeper into the night. But that evening of our first visit to Boss Xun’s casino was in late September and there were just a handful of fights. After they were over Boss Xun asked if we wanted to visit the public house.
The public house is designed to counter some of the more underhand tactics said to be popular among cricket trainers. The most sensational of these is doping, especially with ecstasy. Although a tripped-out cricket is likely to be a winning cricket, the drug’s real target is the opposition: crickets are acutely sensitive to stimulants. They rapidly detect when their adversary is chemically enhanced and they respond by turning tail, so forfeiting the contest.
Every cricket slated for Boss Xun’s casino spends at least five days undergoing detox in his public house. Part maximum security zone, part clinic, it was a four-room apartment stripped and retooled. Three rooms had multiply-padlocked steel gates, the fourth was a social space equipped with couch, chairs, TV and PlayStation, its whitewashed walls decorated with colour close-ups — glamour shots — of crickets. Nobody drank or smoked. Two of the gated rooms were bolted storage areas lined with shelves on which I made out stacks of cricket pots. The third was unlocked and, like the casino, brightly lit. Boss Xun led us inside and I saw a long table and a row of men—owners and trainers there to care for their insects — each tending to a pot. Two assistants, men I recognized from the casino, were stationed across the table. One of them fetched the labelled pots from a cabinet behind him while the other closely observed the visitors. But what made the scene momentarily disorienting was that the men lined up at the table, silently intent on their crickets, were dressed identically in white surgical gowns and matching white masks.
Bio-security is everything. It is well known that trainers dip their yard grass in solutions of ginseng and other substances, which, like smelling salts in a boxing corner, can revive even the most battered fighter; they try to contaminate the food and water of their competitors’ animals; they try to engulf them in poisonous gas. They’ll even insert tiny knives in their yard grass and put poison on their fingertips hoping to get close enough to the opposition.
Nonetheless, the public house isn’t foolproof. One chink in the armour is when the insects first enter. This is when they’re fed and then weighed on an electronic scale. This weight is recorded on the side of the pot, along with the date and owner’s name, and it then becomes the basis on which insects are allocated to fighting pairs. Great care is taken to match crickets as precisely as possible. Weights are recorded in zhen, a Shanghainese cricket-specific measure now used nationally for this purpose. One zhen is around a fifth of a gram, and there should be no more than 0.2 zhen between paired fighters. Trainers have become adept at manipulating their insects’ weight. In the past, they would subject the animals to an extended sauna to extract liquid just before the weigh-in. Nowadays, it’s more common to use dehydration drugs, impossible to detect and, by all accounts, with few ill-effects. Once fed, weighed and admitted, the animal has at least five days under the care of the public house staff and his visiting trainer to recover his strength, and, if all goes to plan, he’ll ultimately fight below his weight — imagine Mike Tyson versus Sugar Ray Leonard…