Cricket Fighting

7.
Centuries before anyone thought of placing crickets in pots and provoking them to fight each other, their evocative singing and their presence in the home gave them a special place in Chinese life. In this poem from the Shïjïng (The Book of Songs), an anthology compiled around 3,000 years ago, the cricket seeks out human company and finds its way into the heart of the household: It is in the wild in the seventh month, / Under the eaves in the eighth month, / In the house in the ninth month, / and under my bed in the tenth month.

There is a long history of cricket friends—people who become friends through crickets and crickets who become friends with people. Jia Sidao recommends trainers chew sesame seeds before feeding them to their insects, just as mothers sometimes do before feeding them to their babies. But crickets are friends, not babies. And this is something that cricket lovers (unlike some pet lovers) are unlikely to forget. Because, as well as the Five Virtues, they have the Three Reversals.

If the Five Virtues show the similarity between crickets and people, the Three Reversals recognize the differences.

The First Reversal: ‘A defeated cricket will not protest the outcome of a fight; he will simply leave the arena without complaint.’

The Second Reversal: ‘A cricket requires sex before a fight and performs better for the stimulation it provides; rather than having an enervating effect on athletic performance (as, according to this reversal, it does in men), among crickets, pre-game sex promotes physical prowess, mental focus and fighting spirit.’

The Third Reversal: ‘Crickets have sex with the female on the male’s back’ — a position functionally impossible for people (without complicated equipment). Moreover, as the entomologist L.W. Simmons points out in what we might think of as a decisive commentary on Reversal Three: ‘Since the female must actively mount a courting male there is little if any opportunity for forced matings by males.’

The last time I saw Boss Xun, he invited me to travel with him the following year to Shandong. We would spend two weeks there collecting crickets, he said. He knew everyone and had excellent relations with the local authorities. His offer tugged at me strongly — to be around cricket friends, human and insect, once more. Michael was enthusiastic, too. Perhaps, he said, we could spend the entire season with the crickets. That, we agreed, would really be something to come back for.