Insectopedia (16 page)

Afterward, with the fighting over, it was as if a spell had broken. It was only then that I wondered about the violence of this spectacle, about the sovereignty that forces other beings to perform such unwonted acts, about cruelty, and yes, about my failure to wonder. Well, you might say, the ethical suspension (if that’s what it was) is unsurprising; the affinities are not so visceral. These are insects, after all—no red blood, no yielding soft tissue, no untoward vocalizations, no expressive faces—not dogs, not songbirds, not even roosters, certainly not boxers wrestling the stark brutalities of race and class.

And yet that concentrated “being there” that Michael and I experienced during the fight was grounded in sympathy for these animals, and it felt like a more profound sympathy than that more familiar feeling of pity-sympathy for animals in distress. Perhaps it was a case of being swept away in the intensity that gripped the room, perhaps it was a case of the magic of money and risk. Even so, the wave that carried us was a wave of identifications shaped by the cultural literacy we were learning from Master Fang, Mr. Wu, and the rest. There was no question about that.

It had been such a short time—less than two weeks in the country of the crickets—yet already I was having trouble separating these animals from their social selves (their virtues, their personalities, their circulations), and already, to me at least, these fights were their fights, their dramas. But I want to be clear about this: the power of this association between the elaborate culture of the cricket-lovers’ world and the crickets themselves, the ability of this alliance to produce an effect that those of us not accustomed to thinking of ourselves as ontologically entangled with insects might experience as a suspension of the order of natural things (such that these animals were neither objects nor victims nor even a simple projection of human aspiration), is possible only because of the insects themselves, which are not merely the opportunity for culture but its co-authors. (And here is a moment when, yet again, language—at
least, the English language—is not adequate to its task, because even to write about the “association” between the crickets and their cultural selves is absurd. What is a cricket in these circumstances without its existence in culture? What is this culture without the existence of the crickets?)

If the crickets appear to tire, if they hang back, losing interest in confrontation, or if one turns away, dejected, the referee will lower the gate to separate the fighters, reset the sixty-second timer, and invite the trainers to minister to their prospects. Like corner men at a boxing match, they work away to restore their charges’ fighting spirit, using different brushstrokes now, testing their technique. But often, like a boxer after a heavy pummeling, the cricket will simply slump, through loss of spirit or other injury, while his opponent will puff up and sing, and the referee will call an end to the fight. Then, all at once, the hubbub in the casino restarts with a rush, and cash again begins to fly—large notes to the winners, 5 percent in small bills coming back to the referee.

And the crickets? The winner is returned carefully to his pot, ready for the journey home or back into the public house to prepare for another fight. The loser, no matter how valiant, no matter how many of the Five Virtues he displayed, no matter that he is likely to be physically unscathed, has finished his career. The referee collects him in a net and drops him into a large plastic bucket behind the table, to be released “into nature” everyone tells me, to which Michael adds that it’s okay, I shouldn’t worry, he’ll be all right: the curse on anyone who harms a defeated cricket guarantees it.

As the happy times approach their November climax, the phalanx 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 see the public house.

The public house is designed to counter some of the more underhand tactics said to be popular among cricket trainers. Of these, the most sensational
is doping, especially with ecstasy, the head-shaking drug of Shanghai’s teen dance clubs.
¹⁵
As anyone who’s taken ecstasy can imagine, a high cricket is likely to be a winning cricket. However, it might not be the rush of energy and confidence or the elevated sense of personal charm, attractiveness, and well-being that assures victory. In this type of doping, the real target is the opposition. Crickets are acutely sensitive to stimulants (hence the no-smoking, no-scent rule). They rapidly detect when their adversary is chemically enhanced, and they respond instantly (and no doubt sensibly) by turning tail, forfeiting the contest.

We left the casino and drove through downtown streets lined with new trees gleaming synthetically under fluorescent light, past sleeping factories and darkened office buildings, along wide, empty boulevards, past bright restaurants, dazzling neon karaoke palaces, late-night stalls selling vegetables, DVDs, and hot food, past the round-the-clock construction I’d so quickly grown to expect, along partly paved side streets, beside what could have been a canal, drawing up at another faded apartment building, ducking in through another anonymous door.

I enjoyed the feeling of anticipation as the car slipped through the quiet streets. My mind drifted to the discussion earlier that day in the golden banquet room at the Luxurious Garden between Boss Yang and Mr. Tung, the gambler from Nanjing, about what makes a successful casino. Mr. Tung had traveled from Nanjing to escape his circle—it was too small and too professional, he said; the crickets were too strong and the competition too fierce. Here in Minhang, he told Boss Yang with no sign of awkwardness, his chances of winning were greater, greater too than if he would go to downtown Shanghai.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr. Tung’s perfect casino would be a place of comfort as well as security, a place with an appealing atmosphere. He conjured an image of expansive largesse, a scene peopled by relaxed and prosperous gamblers, frank and open, not the kind of men who would argue over small change. He seemed to be casting himself as Chow Yun-Fat in Wong Jing’s classic
God of Gamblers
or as Tony Leung in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s
Flowers of Shanghai—
or maybe that was my gambling fantasy, not his. He said: The crucial thing is connection; you should be cultivating the successful gamblers, encouraging them to bring more and more of their associates.

Boss Yang and Boss Xun’s casino attracted gamblers from Hong Kong, Zhejiang, and elsewhere, as well as from Nanjing. However, the two men were not focused on pampering their clients. There were reasons to keep the atmosphere congenial—an argument could lead to a killing and make the police feel that they had to put on a show—but, Boss Yang countered, the surest route to a successful business was through a reputation for fairness. The most important quality of a casino was the trust between the sponsor and his clients. Owners, trainers, and gamblers (often the same people) should feel safe and should be confident that their animals were safe too.

The public house was an impressive place, part maximum-security zone, part clinic. Every cricket slated for Boss Xun’s casino spent at least five days undergoing prophylactic detox here. There are thousands of such houses throughout Shanghai, he tells us, and he’s run one for many years, though of course in a variety of locations. It’s no game. The risk is large, increased tonight by the novelty of bringing me here. Several sponsors had been arrested and some executed in the anti-gambling drive that swept Shanghai the year before, and as we talk, Boss Xun’s right leg stutters rhythmically.

The public house is a four-room apartment stripped and retooled. Three rooms have multiply padlocked steel gates; the fourth is a social space equipped with couch, chairs, TV, and PlayStation, its whitewashed walls decorated with color close-ups of crickets, glamour shots. Nobody drinks or smokes. Two of the gated rooms are caged storage areas lined with shelves, on which I make out stacks of cricket pots. The third has been unlocked, and like the casino, it is brightly lit. Boss Xun leads us inside, and I see a long table and a row of men—owners and trainers here to care for their insects—each tending to a pot. Two assistants, men I recognize from the casino, are stationed across the table. One of them fetches the labeled pots from a cabinet behind him while the other closely observes the visitors. But what makes the scene genuinely startling and momentarily disorienting, even surreal, is that the men lined up at the table, silently intent on their crickets, are dressed identically in white surgical gowns and matching white masks.

Biosecurity is everything. Trainers in the public house give animals only the food and water provided on the premises, and in the casino use
only those implements provided by the sponsor. 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. It’s well known that they try to contaminate the food and water of their competitors’ animals, that they try to engulf them in poisonous gas. It’s well known that they’ll insert tiny knives into their own yard grass and put poison on their fingertips in the hope of getting close enough to touch the opposition.

Nonetheless, the public house isn’t foolproof. One chink in the armor is the moment the insects first enter, when they’re fed and then weighed on an electronic scale. The weight is recorded on the side of the pot, along with the date and the owner’s name, and it then becomes the basis on which to assign the insects to fighting pairs. Great care is taken to match crickets as precisely as possible, to make the fights as even as possible, an effort that is institutionalized in the system of raising equal stakes on both animals at the start of a fight. Weights are recorded in
zhen
, a Shanghainese cricket-specific measure now used nationally. One
zhen
is around a fifth of a gram, and there must be no more than two tenths of a
zhen
difference between paired fighters. Recognizing an opportunity, 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, which are impossible to detect and, by all accounts, produce 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!

It wasn’t long before we were back in Boss Xun’s casino, once more in seats of honor and once more in the grip of the crickets. Again I was impressed by the professionalism of it all. From the secured metal trunk carried in by the public-house assistants to the quickness of the referee and Boss Xun’s own congenial working of the crowd, this was a smoothly run operation. We caught the last train back to the city, and I again recalled the lunchtime discussion between Boss Yang and Mr. Tung. Boss Yang had stuck tenaciously to his view that nothing was
more important than the casino’s reputation for fairness, and now I understood why. After all, only the sponsor and his staff had unsupervised access to the animals. With little difficulty, they could influence the contest in various hard-to-detect ways: by hiring a partisan referee, by matching the fighters unevenly, by neglecting to care for particular individuals adequately or by lavishing extra care on favorites (including their own—Boss Xun liked to fight his crickets here too). I remembered Boss Yang’s vigorous defense of his staff in response to Mr. Wu’s request to bypass the public house, and I saw that of course there must be no exceptions. Without full confidence in the sponsor’s probity and in his ability to create an environment safe from violence, corruption, and the police, there could be no circle, no event, no gambling, no profit, no entertainment, no culture.

Dr. Li Shijun of Shanghai 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 program included on a DVD I’d picked up on Anguo Road. The reporter was enthusiastic about the professor’s campaign to promote cricket fighting as a high-culture activity free of gambling. “Gambling,” she said in the final voice-over, “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 about a gambling-free tournament he had staged downtown. The newspaper journalist identified Dr. Li as the “cricket professor.” The TV reporter had called him the “venerable cricket master.”