Insectopedia (18 page)

I wondered how the market in crickets could survive without gambling cash. I thought of all those men at Boss Xun’s casino, the intense gazes, the sudden silence, the blur of crickets under the lights, the explosive laughter. I thought how, despite all its evident dangers, it is gambling—with its illicit pleasures, its secure masculinity, its justification of obsession, its profound cultural rooting, its incentive to commodification, and its underwriting of an entire informal economy—that has kept cricket fighting alive, and it is Boss Xun and his associates who, like it or not, are the guardians of this world and its dynamic traditions.

Gambling isn’t just economic, I said. There’s a culture of gambling, and a sociality, and a living history, too, of gambling on anything, not only on crickets—though crickets are especially fantastic for this! Gambling is as much “traditional culture” as cricket raising. Even Jia Sidao was a gambler! To which Dr. Li replied evenly that the government’s target was not gambling itself but the social problems it generated. Anyway, he could never gamble no matter how exciting it might be. How could he take his friends’ money? Such behavior was inappropriate for a scholar. And look, he said, the problem is not small gambling, a few coins here
and there to spice up a game. The problem is when people wager their house, their possessions, gamble away their lives. Of course, we could never eradicate something so deep in society. But over time, by example, an alternative could grow. And he sketched a vision of a future Shanghai in which a cricket fight was much like a cross between a sports tournament and a pet show—much like the world of Japanese stag and rhinoceros beetles, in fact—a world in which restrained but enthusiastic people, young and old, studied and collected, formed clubs and shared knowledge. He was already promoting such events, he said, and they were attracting his students from Jiao Tong University.

And much later, long after lunch was over, after I had learned so much and enjoyed such kind hospitality, after most of the other guests had left, after we had talked for several hours about his project in Henan (crickets can help those people escape their poverty, he had said), about his idea of reforming cricket classification (it’s too complicated even for the experts, he had said with much amusement), and about his belief that far from dying out (as all my other insect friends thought it was), cricket culture was in fact thriving among the young, after the long journey home across this ever-growing city, and after Li Jun had quizzed me up and down on the bus to the metro station, only then, back in my downtown hotel room, with its view across the sparkling cityscape, did Michael and I reconstruct the day’s conversations and—remember that by now we both felt ourselves to be so deep in the world of Shanghai cricket fighting and were both somehow so invested in its realness—he said, and I had to agree, that although he had great respect for Professor Li, this idea of reforming cricket culture through example would lead to two types of cricket fighting: one would be elite, aboveground, and organized around well-funded official championships; the other would be underground and illegal, it would involve gambling, it would continue to be treated with fear and disdain, and it would have better crickets, better matches, and more excitement. And, Michael said, he thought that Dr. Li and his friends understood this, that they were far from naïve. And, he continued in that wise and generous way of his, that was okay. They just want their world, he said, and that’s not necessarily such a bad thing.

Centuries before anyone thought of placing crickets in pots and provoking them to fight with yard grass, their evocative singing and their presence in the home cast an annual blow against loneliness and gave them a special place in Chinese life. In this poem from
Shijing
(
The Book of Songs
), an anthology compiled around 3,000 years ago, it is the cricket that seeks out human company and finds its way into the intimate heart of the household:

There is a deep, deep history of cricket friends—people who become friends through crickets and crickets who themselves become friends with people. It wasn’t only Xiao Fu who told me how his crickets were his friends and how he tries to make them happy, how he can tell when they are happy and how they can tell that he cares, how, as Jia Sidao suggests, he chews sesame seeds before feeding them to his insects just as mothers sometimes chew their babies’ food before feeding it to them. But crickets are friends, not babies. And that is something cricket lovers (unlike some pet lovers) are unlikely to forget. Because, as well as the Five Virtues, they have the Three Reversals.

You remember that the Five Virtues show the similarities between crickets and people? They are five classical qualities (loyalty, courage, trustworthiness, and so on), exemplary virtues that can be found in ancient heroes and toward which ordinary people (like you and I) can aspire. The Five Virtues reveal a deep ontological connection between people and crickets, a shared being in the world that forms the basis for the attachments and identifications that, along with gambling, have kept cricket fighting alive for so many centuries. The Three Reversals recognize the complementary reality: they acknowledge the definitive difference between crickets and people.

The First Reversal:
A defeated cricket will not protest the outcome of a fight; he will simply leave the arena without bluster or 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), pregame sex among crickets promotes physical prowess, mental focus, and a 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 the Third Reversal, “Since the female must actively mount a courting male there is little if any opportunity for forced matings by males.”
²⁴

Like the Virtues, the Reversals are both empirical and symbolic, derived from close observation and pointed at things bigger than themselves. Psychological, physiological, and anatomical—they are systematic, comprehensive, and economical. When taken together, the Virtues and the Reversals offer a way of forming relationships with other beings that accepts that they are both like and unlike ourselves, not in some generalized abstract way, but in quite particular respects that provide grounds for connections and empathies as well as points of utter disconnection. I don’t think it matters whether you’re committed to crickets through gambling or you’re committed to ending gambling in the name of a higher culture. I think the Virtues, the Reversals, the Flaws, the Taboos, and all the other entryways into the world of cricket fighting
take you to a place governed by the laws of us/not us, where similarity/difference simply persists as a fact of existence and does not require resolution. I think this is just as it should be, even if there is little else that can be relied on to persist right now in Shanghai.

The last time I saw Boss Xun, he invited me to travel with him to Shandong next year. 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. It would be good to experience the happy times once more. It would be good to be around cricket friends, human and insect, again. It would be good to live, just for a while, in that space of acceptance where things are simultaneously one thing and another. 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.

I missed the crickets. I missed their friends. I opened
The New York Times
and missed them even more.

Flies, fruit flies,
Drosophila melanogaster
, the experimental animal par excellence, arguably more important even than rats or mice in the history of modern science. These haunting video stills were shot in 2006 in a neuroscience lab in southern California. The flies are fighting, and the U.S. government—channeling its money through the National Science Foundation—is betting on the winners.
¹
The arena is a telegenic blue.

Herman A. Dierick and Ralph J. Greenspan, lead researchers at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, are breeding fruit flies for aggression. Flies, they tell Nicholas Wade of the
Times
, are militantly territorial in the wild but lose their edge in captivity. Professors Dierick and Greenspan fill pots with fly food and encourage individual males to defend them. They call this the “arena assay.” They rank the flies on an “aggression profile” based on four criteria: the frequency of fighting, the rapidity with which the animals engage, the amount of time a pair spends in combat, and the fervor of the battle (“the number of high-intensity elements such as holding or tossing”).

Dierick, Greenspan, and their colleagues separate the most belligerent
fighters to use as breeding stock. After twenty-one generations, they report aggression-profile differences of more than thirtyfold compared with their control population of standard laboratory flies. “Because aggression levels are likely to be strongly influenced by the brain,” they decapitate generation 21. They grind the heads. They want to know if genes expressed in the fighters’ brains can be correlated with the newly aggressive behavior. “Dr. Greenspan said an understanding of how genes set up circuits to govern behavior would be of broad significance in understanding what makes either flies or people tick,” writes Wade.
²

Fruit flies are well suited to the experimental life. Perhaps too well. They breed fast (in ten days, a female can complete her reproductive cycle and produce 400 or even 1,000 offspring). They have a relatively simple genetic structure (only four to seven chromosomes). And like every other organism, they mutate.

In 1910, the Columbia University geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan stumbled on the capacity of
Drosophila
to produce startlingly visible mutations—and to produce them in quantity. Almost at once, fruit flies were no longer just minor annoyances that breezed in through the open summer windows in upper Manhattan, nosed around, and stayed or left. They were “fellow laborers,” as their biographer Robert Kohler puts it.
³
Morgan’s lab soon became their lab (the internationally famous Fly Room), and Morgan and his colleagues soon became their scientists (they called themselves fly people and drosophilists).

Very rapidly, the fruit fly became a fixture of genetics laboratories worldwide. Indeed, writes Kohler, without its capacity to act as “a biological breeder reactor” and produce enormous quantities of mutants, we might still be awaiting the arrival of modern genetics.
⁴

In those early years, as Morgan and his fly people incorporated
Drosophila
into their experimental work, they found themselves struggling to keep up with its prodigious ability to produce mutations. They were overwhelmed by, swamped by, mutants. Such a quantity of new data demanded a new experimental method, one characterized by high-
volume efficiency, and mass gene mapping rapidly took shape as the new signature of genetic research. In turn, the constraints of the new method demanded a new fly, a consistent fly that could be compared to other flies with confidence. It required an animal free of the high natural variability of the nonlaboratory population, an animal in which all observed variation would be unmistakably a product of experimental mutation, “The little fly,” writes Kohler, was “redesigned and reconstructed into a new kind of laboratory instrument, a living analogue of microscopes, galvanometers, or analytical reagents.”
⁵