Cricket Fighting

5.
A few days later, Michael took me to Wanshang, the largest flower, bird, beast, and insect market in Shanghai. The main hall was filled with traders — mostly women — recently arrived in Shanghai from Shandong and other provinces of eastern China. They sat in rows with their crickets laid out neatly in small pots before them. Around the edges of the hall, permanent stalls were occupied by Shanghainese dealers, also newly returned from buying crickets in the rural districts, their clay pots arrayed on tables, the insects’ origin chalked up on a blackboard behind them.

Michael showed me the same pattern at cricket markets throughout the city. At Anguo Road, in the grim shadow of Tilanqiao, Shanghai’s largest jail, Shanghainese sellers sit at tables while traders from the provinces squat on stools in their own distinct areas, their pots laid out on the ground.

Even though the provincial traders at these markets don’t plan to stay in Shanghai and even though they are likely to be relatively prosperous in their home districts, once in the city they are migrants, subject to harassment, discrimination and expulsion. Nonetheless, most expect to do well. By minimizing their outgoings, travelling with relatives, going home infrequently, carrying as much stock as possible when they return, and sleeping in cheap hotels close to the market, they can make considerably more in the three months of the cricket season than in the entire rest of the year.

Shanghainese traders don’t sell female crickets. Females don’t fight or sing and are valued only for the sexual services they provide to males. It’s the provincial traders who deal in these, selling them in bulk, stuffed into bamboo sections in lots of three or ten, depending on their size (bigger is better) and colouring (a white abdomen is best). Females are cheap, and, at first glance, it seems as if these traders only sell cheap animals, female and male.

The signs in front of the provincial traders said ten yuan for each male, sometimes two for fifteen. The buyers filed past their pots, browsing the rows with an air of detachment, occasionally lifting the lids to peer inside, taking the grass brush, stimulating the insect’s jaws, perhaps shining a flashlight to gauge the colour and translucence of its body, trying to judge not only its physical qualities but its fighting spirit. Despite their studied indifference, they were often drawn in, quickly finding themselves bargaining for an insect priced anywhere between thirty and 2,000 yuan. Only children, novices like me, the elderly, the truly petty gamblers who play crickets for fun, and bargain hunters who believe their eye is sharper than the seller’s, would buy the cheap crickets, it seems.

But how do you judge an insect’s spirit without seeing it fight? Groups of men crowd around the Shanghainese stalls. Eventually, someone moved aside to share the view: two crickets locking jaws inside their table-top arena. The stallholders tended to the animals like trainers at a real fight. But they were seated in chairs, pots piled around them, and as the match progressed they delivered relentless patter like auctioneers, talking up the winner and attempting to raise its price.

This is a risky sales strategy. No one buys a loser, so the defeated are quickly tossed into a plastic bucket. And if, as often happens, the winner isn’t sold either, he has to fight again and may be beaten or injured. The seller relies on his ability to inflate the winner’s price enough to compensate for the losses. But the woman from Shanghai who eagerly waved us over as she spooned tiny portions of rice into doll’s-house-sized trays, told us that the Shanghainese insisted on watching the crickets fight before they’d put their money down; that they liked to shift the risk to the seller.

‘Provincial traders don’t dare fight their crickets,’ the woman said. She was lively and straightforward and generous, too, inviting us to share her lunch and giving me a souvenir cricket pot, disappointed I wouldn’t take the insect as well. She expounded on her neighbours, traders from Shandong province. ‘They sell their crickets as brand new to fighting,’ she said, so casually it almost slipped past, and it was only thanks to Michael’s quickness that I discovered she was telling us that crickets circulate throughout the market, unconstrained by social division; they pass not only from trader to buyer but also from trader to trader, from Shanghainese to Shandongese, and from Shandongese to Shanghainese. And, as they travel through these crowded spaces, they gain and even recover value; they’re born again: losers become ingénues, cheap crickets become contenders.

For a few weeks, the crickets are everywhere. On working-class street corners, groups of men cram themselves around an arena, watching the battles unfold. In the newspapers, it’s high culture and lowlife, elite sponsorship and police raids. The crickets bring the gambling houses to life. They light up the stores that sell the elaborate implements every cricket trainer needs: tiny food and water dishes; wooden transfer cases; ‘marriage boxes’; grass and whisker brushes made of duck down; tiny long-handled metal trowels and other cleaning implements; pipettes; scales (weighted and electronic); technical manuals; specialized foods and medicines; and, of course, cricket pots in enormous variety, some old (and often fake), some new, most of clay but some of porcelain, some to commemorate special cricket events, some large, some small, some with inscriptions, mottoes or stories, some with intricate images, some (perhaps the most beautiful of all) plain.