Cricket Fighting

6.
Dr Li Shijun of Jiao Tong University invited us to his home. A few journalists, some cricket experts, and a university colleague or two would also be
there. We must be sure to show up as planned.

I was keen to meet Dr Li. I’d seen him interviewed on a TV programme included on a DVD I’d picked up at one of Shanghai’s many cricket markets. The reporter was enthusiastic about the professor’s campaign to promote cricket fighting as a high-culture activity free of gambling, a project in line with state policy. ‘Gambling,’ she said in the final voiceover, ‘has ruined the reputation of cricket fighting. Cricket fighting is like Beijing Opera, it is the quintessence of our country. Many foreigners regard it as the most typically oriental element of our culture. We should lead it to a healthy road.’ Just a few days before I arrived in Shanghai, Dr Li had again featured prominently in the media: this time in a newspaper article on a gambling-free tournament he had staged downtown. The newspaper journalist identified Dr Li as the ‘Cricket Professor’. The TV reporter called him the ‘Venerable Cricket Master’.

Dr Li’s apartment was tucked away in a corner of a low-rise housing complex close to the university campus. He was a charming host, warm and welcoming, a youthful sixty-four-year-old with a mane of silver hair. Several people were already there when we arrived and he swiftly corralled us into his office, all the while pointing out the prizes from his lifelong passion: the cricket-themed paintings, poems and calligraphy created by himself and his friends that enlivened the walls and bookcases, the large collection of southern cricket pots that formed the focus of one of his four published books on cricket-related matters.

Dr Li grew up in Shanghai and, like other men of his generation, his fascination with crickets was sparked and nurtured by an older brother. He described passing the large (now long-gone) cricket market at Chenghuangmiao every day on his way to school in the Cricket Fighting late 1940s; he remembered using his pocket money to buy crickets and the circle of ‘insect friends’ that grew around him — boys his own age and the adults who would stop to play with them.

At the end of his book Fifty Don’ts of Cricket Collecting (don’t buy a cricket with rounded wings, don’t buy a cricket with just one antenna, don’t buy a cricket that is half-male, half-female, etc.), Dr Li remarks that it’s no mystery that society looks down on cricket fighting; whereas at the university he teaches in a suit and tie, at the insect market, surrounded by ‘low-level people’, he has to wear a T shirt, shorts and slippers like everyone else. The lack of cultivation— evident in the smoking, cursing and spitting all around him—was not simply a personal matter: ‘If you want others to treat you with respect you must first act decently,’ he insisted. It wasn’t just a question of deportment either. For Dr Li, there is a crisis of civility in Chinese society and cricket fighting is part of the solution. With its ancient traditions and scholarly demands, cricket-fighting is a rare practice, closer to tai chi than mahjong. But it is a practice debased by gambling.

Campaigns against gambling have been a feature of the People’s Republic since 1949. But despite periodically aggressive policing and especially since the post-Mao reforms, the Party has had little success in controlling its expansion. Unlike the failed attempt to outlaw mahjong during the 1980s, the assault on crickets has been indirect and, in this respect, has paralleled policy during the Ming and Qing dynasties, when imperial prohibitions ran up against the emerging professional network of urban cricket houses, but legislation continued to target gambling rather than crickets.

Dr Li told us about his scheme to promote development in Henan province by helping local farmers enter the Shanghai cricket market in competition with traders from Shandong, Anhui and elsewhere. He was spending significant sums of his own money on this project and investing a great deal of his considerable energy, even travelling to the countryside to donate equipment and teach villagers how to distinguish between different insect species. The village he was working with was on the same latitude as Shandong and he had every reason to expect its crickets to be as strong. The pilot project had produced promising results. It was now only a question of convincing the buying public.

He led us into a large sitting room in which he had laid out a variety of pots and implements. Selecting two pots, he carried them over to a low coffee table positioned in front of a couch. He transferred the crickets into an arena on the table and invited me to sit beside him. He put a yard-grass straw in my hand and, as people often did, encouraged me to stimulate the insects’ jaws. I was clumsy with the brush and always felt as if I was tormenting the insect, who, more often than not, simply stood still and suffered my attentions. But I was jiggling my wrist as best I could when I looked up to find that all the other people present, with the exception of Dr Li, who continued to stare intently at the crickets as if he and I were alone in the room, had produced digital cameras, and were lined up in formation, snapping away at close range like paparazzi at a premiere. And now Dr Li turned creative director, instructing me how to position the grass, how to hold my head, what to look at, how to sit…

A few days later an article appeared in the Shanghai Evening Post under the headline ANTHROPOLOGIST STUDYING HUMAN-INSECT RELATIONS, U.S. PROFESSOR WANTS TO PUBLISH A BOOK FOR CRICKETS. Its author was Li Jing, a smart young reporter I had met at Dr Li’s house. Li Jing subtly traced Dr Li’s erudition. She noted his eager recourse to the yellowing books on his shelves and his willingness to take me as his acolyte as well as his friend (‘Questions flew out of his mouth like bullets,’ she wrote of my reaction to the crickets). In offering me guidance, Dr Li was chuandao jie huo, a Confucian term for the teacher’s task of passing on the knowledge of the ancient sages and resolving its interpretive difficulties. She let her readers know that his pro-cricket, anti-gambling campaign was a matter of culture, that it reached out from the whirlpool of the present to a higher ground that was both an available safe haven of the past and an anchor for the future. The photo caption, adapting a well-known saying, read, ‘United by their love of crickets, these two strangers immediately became friends.’