Cricket Fighting
4.
The speed of urban growth and transformation in Shanghai is stunning. In less than one generation, the fields that gave the crickets a home have all but gone. Now, dense ranks of giant apartment buildings, elongated boxes with baroque and neo-classical flourishes, stretch pink and grey in every direction, past the ends of the newly built metro lines, past even the ends of the suburban bus routes. The spectacular neon waterfront of Pudong, the symbol of Shanghai’s drive to seize the future, is only ten years old but already under revision. I marvelled at the brash bravery of the Pearl Oriental Tower, a multi-coloured rocketship that dominates the dazzling skyline, and thought how impossible it would be to build something so bold yet whimsical in New York.
Michael and his college-age friends laughed. ‘We’re a bit tired of it, actually,’ Michael said. But they also know nostalgia. Only ten years ago, in what seems like another world, they helped fathers and uncles collect and raise crickets in their neighbourhoods. They moved in and out of each other’s homes and alleyways, sharing a daily life that the high-rise apartments have now banished. Downtown, remnants of that life are visible in pockets not yet rebuilt or thematized. Sometimes, though, residents are merely waiting, surrounded by their neighbours’ rubble, holding out against forced relocation to distant suburbs as the government clears more housing in time for the city to host Expo 2010.
Eighteen kilometres from the city centre and a crowded fifteen-minute bus ride from the huge metro terminus at Xinzhuang, the township of Qibao is a different kind of neighbourhood. An official heritage attraction, a stroll through a past violently disavowed for its feudalism during the Cultural Revolution but now embraced as a part of national culture, Qibao is newly elegant with canals and bridges; its narrow pedestrianized streets are lined with reconstructed Ming- and Qing-dynasty buildings. There are storefronts selling all kinds of snack foods, teas and craft goods to Shanghainese and other visitors, a temple with Han, Tang, and Ming dynasty architectural features, a weaving workshop, an ancient tea-house, a famous wine distillery and — in a house built specifically for the sport by the great Qing emperor Qianlong — Shanghai’s only museum dedicated to fighting crickets.
All these crickets were collected here in Qibao, said Master Fang, the museum’s director. He stood behind a table laden with hundreds of grey clay pots, each containing one fighting male and, in some cases, its female sex partner. Qibao’s crickets were famous throughout East Asia, a product of the township’s rich soils, he told us. But since the fields here were sold off in 2000, crickets have been harder to find. Master Fang’s two white-uniformed assistants filled the insects’ miniature water bowls from pipettes and we humans all drank pleasantly astringent tea made from his recipe of seven medicinal herbs. Master Fang was an animated storyteller and Michael and I were drawn to him immediately. ‘Master Fang is a cricket master,’ confided his assistant, Ms Zhao. ‘He has forty years’ experience. There is no one more able to instruct you about crickets.’
Everyone at the museum was caught up in preparations for the Qibao Golden Autumn Cricket Festival. The three-week event includes a series of exhibition matches and a championship, with all fights broadcast on closed-circuit TV. The goal is to promote cricket fighting as a popular activity distinct from the gambling with which it is now so firmly associated, to remind people of its historical and cultural origins, and to extend its appeal beyond the demographic in which it now seems caught: men in their forties and above.
Twenty years ago, before the construction of the new Shanghai gobbled up the landscape, when city neighbourhoods were still patchworks of fields and houses, people lived more intimately with animal life. Many found companionship in cicadas or other musical insects that they kept in bamboo cages and slim pocket boxes, and young people, not just the middle-aged, fought crickets. They learned how to judge a likely champion and train the fighters to their fullest potential and how to use the pencil-thin brushes made of yard grass or mouse whisker to stimulate the insects’ jaws and provoke them to combat. They also learned the Three Rudiments around which every cricket manual is structured: judging, training and fighting.
Cricket fighting is experiencing a revival in China. Even as it loses out to computer games and Japanese manga with the young, it is thriving among older generations. Yet, it’s an insecure return that few aficionados are celebrating. For even as the cricket markets flourish and the gambling dens proliferate, much of this enthusiasm is accompanied by a sense that this is another feature of daily life which, like so much else, is already as good as gone.
Master Fang pulled a cricket pot from the shelf behind him and ran his finger over the text etched on its surface. In a strong voice, he began to recite, drawing out the tones in the dramatic cadences of classical oratory. These are the Five Virtues, he announced, five human qualities found in the best fighting crickets, five virtues that crickets and humans share.
The First Virtue: ‘When it is time to sing, he will sing. This is trustworthiness.’
The Second Virtue: ‘On meeting an enemy, he will not hesitate to fight. This is courage.’
The Third Virtue: ‘Even seriously wounded, he will not surrender. This is loyalty.’
The Fourth Virtue: ‘When defeated he will not sing. He knows shame.’
The Fifth Virtue: ‘When he becomes cold, he will return to his home. He is wise and recognizes the facts of the situation.’
On their tiny backs crickets carry the weight of the past. The loyalty of the Third Virtue, for example, is no ordinary loyalty; it is the loyalty one feels for the emperor, the willingness to lay down one’s life, and not to shirk one’s ultimate duty. These are not simply ancient virtues, they are points on a moral compass. As anyone will tell you, these crickets are warriors; the champions among them are generals.
The passage on Master Fang’s pot is taken from the thirteenth-century Book of Crickets, the earliest surviving manual for cricket lovers and perhaps the world’s first book of entomology. Its author, Jia Sidao (1213–75), is still remembered as imperial China’s ‘cricket minister’, the sensual chief minister in the dying days of the Southern Song dynasty, so absorbed in the pleasures of his crickets that he allowed his neglected state to tumble into rack, ruin and domination by the invading Mongols.
Jia Sidao was the first to document the complex system by which cricket lovers classify their animals. He identified and ranked four body colours: first yellow, then red, black and finally white. The authoritative xishuai.com cricket lovers’ website now adds purple and green. Each colour corresponds to a broad category of behaviour. However, most of the cricket experts I met in Shanghai describe only three colours: yellow, green and purple. Yellow crickets are said to be the most aggressive, but not necessarily the best fighters, because green insects, although quieter, are more strategic and — according to the annual illustrated list of cricket champions — include a greater number of Generals.
Below these gross distinctions is a further set of divisions into individual ‘personalities’, whose total number is often put at seventy-two. Trainers use a system based on physical variables and complex clusters of characteristics. Length, shape and colour of the insect’s legs, abdomen and wings are all systematically parsed, as is the shape of the head — current manuals might include seven or more possibilities — and differences in number, shape, colour and width of the ‘fight-lines’ that run front-to-back across the crown. Experts also consider the energy of the antennae, the shape and colour of the animal’s ‘eyebrows’ (which should be ‘opposite’ in colour to the antennae), the shape, colour, translucence and strength of the jaws, the shape and size of the neck plate, the shape and resting angle of the forewings, the sharpness of the tail-tips, the hair on the abdomen, the width of the thorax and face, the thickness of the feet, the animal’s overall posture. The insect’s ‘skin’ must be ‘dry’, that is, it must reflect light from inside itself, not from its surface; it must also be delicate, like a baby’s. The cricket’s walk must be swift and easy; it should not have a rolling gait. In general, strength is more important than size. The jaws are decisive.
Judging a cricket’s quality requires deep knowledge. Nonetheless, judging is only one of the three rudiments of cricket knowledge, and for Master Fang, it is less important than training.
Master Fang told us that the trainer’s task is to build on the cricket’s pre-existing natural virtues to develop its fighting spirit. This indispensable quality is revealed only at the moment the insect enters the arena. Though a cricket might look like a champion in all respects, it can still turn out to lack spirit in competition. This, Master Fang insisted, has less to do with the individual cricket’s character than with its care. It is the task of the trainer to build up the cricket’s strength with foods appropriate to its stage of growth and individual needs, to respond to its sicknesses, develop its physical skills, cultivate its virtues, overcome its natural aversion to light and habituate it to new surroundings. A cricket knows when it is loved and cared for and it responds with loyalty, courage, obedience and the signs of quiet contentment.
Master Fang removed the lid from one of his pots, took his yardgrass straw and barked orders at the cricket as if at a soldier (‘This way! That way! This way! That way!’) and the insect, to Michael’s and my real astonishment, responded unhesitatingly, turning left, right, left, right, a routine of exercises that Master Fang explained increased the fighter’s flexibility, made him limber and elastic, and showed that man and insect understand each other through the language of command as well as beyond it.