Insectopedia (13 page)

But let’s not lose sight of Jia Sidao just yet. His book is too important and too interesting. It ranges across philosophy, literature, medicine, and lore, as well as the knowledge that falls under today’s more restricted nineteenth-century model of natural history. In its scope it is reminiscent of other great early-modern insect compendia such as book VII of Ulisse Aldrovandi’s
De animalibus
(1602) and Thomas Moffett’s
Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum
(1634), the first European books dedicated entirely to insects (which, we might note, were not published until more than 300 years after the
Book of Crickets
).

Jia’s ambitions were different from those of the European naturalists, and he writes not with their unrestrained desire to assemble and, in their own ways, possess the natural universe but with the more modest impulse to serve the community of gamblers, of which he was a part. Like Aldrovandi’s and Moffett’s volumes, the
Book of Crickets
is a work of compilation and systematization. But, whereas the impending post-Enlightenment disciplining of European natural philosophy doomed Aldrovandi’s and Moffett’s often-fanciful encyclopedias to long-term
obscurity, Jia’s approach is so rigorously empirical and so calibrated to the demands of his fellow insect lovers that—notwithstanding the critical orientation to classical erudition that permeates today’s cricket community and the corresponding periodic complaints about Jia’s unscientific lapses—his detailed diagnostic key to the morphological characteristics of successful warriors is still the basis of cricket knowledge. When Master Fang and other experts tried to instruct me in the distinctions that allow them to judge a cricket’s fighting potential simply by observing the insect in its pot, they used the taxonomy that appeared first in Jia’s
Book of Crickets
and was modified and supplemented—but not overthrown—across the centuries.

The system is fearsomely complex. It begins with body color. Jia identifies and ranks four body colors: first yellow, then red, black, and finally white. The authoritative Xishuai.com cricket-lovers’ website adds purple and green—for which cricket people always use the ancient term
qing—
to this list but does not rank them. By contrast, most cricket experts I talked to in Shanghai describe only three colors: yellow,
qing
, and purple. Yellow crickets are reputed to be the most aggressive of the three but not necessarily the best fighters because
qing
insects, though quieter, are more strategic and—according to the annual illustrated list of cricket champions—include a greater number of generals.

Color is the first criterion by which crickets are divided and it confers an initial identity that, as we can see, is held to correspond to differences in behavior and character. Below these gross distinctions, however, is a further set of divisions into individual “personalities,” whose total number is often put at seventy-two.
⁸
To entomologists like my friend Professor Jin Xingbao, these personalities relate only to individual—and therefore taxonomically insignificant—variations among crickets that belong to a very limited number of formal species. In the Linnaean terms that she prefers to use, most of the fighting crickets kept in Shanghai are either
Velarifictorus micado
, a black or dark-brown species that grows to seven tenths of an inch and is highly territorial and aggressive in the wild, or, in smaller numbers, the equally bellicose
V. aspersus.
⁹

Because it identifies breeding populations and evolutionary relationships, Professor Jin’s type of classification is essential if, for example, the goal is conservation. However, I suspect she would agree that it’s
not much use to cricket trainers seeking ways of identifying potential champions. Their classification system is based on an agglomeration of numerous physical variables, complex clusters of characters.
¹⁰
Length, shape, and color of the insect’s legs, abdomen, and wings are all systematically parsed, as is the shape of the head—current manuals might include seven or more possibilities—and differences in number, shape, color, and width of the “fight lines” that run front to back across the crown. Experts also consider the energy of the antennae; the shape and color of the animal’s “eyebrows” (which should be “opposite” in color to the antennae); the shape, color, translucence, and strength of the jaws; the shape and size of the neck plate; the shape and resting angle of the forewings; the sharpness of the tail tips; the hair on the abdomen; the width of the thorax and face; the thickness of the feet; and the animal’s overall posture. The insect’s “skin” must be “dry” (that is, it must reflect light from inside itself, not from its surface); it must also be delicate, like a baby’s. The cricket’s walk must be swift and easy; it should not have a rolling gait. In general, strength is more important than size. The quality of the jaws is decisive.

Innumerable manuals are dedicated to the identification of especially desirable crickets. Books are filled with color photos of such admirable personalities as Purple Head Golden Wing, Cooked Shrimp, Bronze Head and Iron Back, Ying Yang Wing, and Strong Man That Nobody Can Harm. But as Professor Jin points out, these are ideal types, individual crickets that display prized combinations of traits and are unlikely to recur in precisely this form.

Though from a natural science perspective, this method may appear to be characterized above all by imprecision and taxonomic confusion, it is closer to zoological classification than it might at first appear. The cricket-lovers’ system is a practical one directed at the identification of signs of fighting prowess and the circulation of these signs within the cricket community in a spirit of democratic scholarship. It is also, in its own way, a moral system, a manual of a perhaps archaic masculinity (though it would be foolish to assume that because these characteristics are valued in crickets, they are therefore admired in men). The mastery of such knowledge can require decades of dedicated application, both book study and hands-on learning. It is comprehensive and also intuitive.
It is largely inaccessible to a novice. Scientific classification, though substantially more recent and directed to different goals, shares many of these features, and it, too, is based on type specimens—the first individuals of a given category to be collected and described, the specimen against which all subsequent individuals will be measured. Moreover, in both systems, so long as individual variation falls within given parameters, it is disregarded.

Taxonomy doesn’t simply require judgment; it is itself a set of judgments. And it is the key to the early-autumn task of acquiring the best possible insects. As Michael and I were told repeatedly, judging a cricket’s quality requires deep knowledge. Nonetheless, judging is only one of three rudiments of cricket knowledge, and for Master Fang it is of less significance than the work of training, which fills the two-week mid-autumn period between
bai lu
, when collecting ends, and
qiu fen
, which marks the official start of the fighting season.

Master Fang tells me that the trainer’s task is to build on preexisting natural virtues to develop the animal’s fighting spirit (
dou xing
). This indispensable quality is revealed only at the moment the insect enters the arena. Though a cricket might look like a champion in all respects, though the judgment of its physical qualities may be correct, it can still turn out to lack spirit in competition. This, Master Fang insists, is less a matter of the individual cricket’s character than a function of its care. It is the task of the trainer to build up the cricket’s strength with foods appropriate to its stage of growth and individual needs, to respond to its sicknesses, develop its physical skills, cultivate its virtues, overcome its natural aversion to light, and habituate it to new, alien surroundings. Fundamentally, says Master Fang, a trainer must create the conditions in which the insect can be happy. A cricket knows when it is loved, and it knows when it is well cared for, and it responds in kind with loyalty, courage, obedience, and the signs of quiet contentment. In practical terms, this is a quid pro quo because a happy cricket is amenable to training, and as its health, skill, and confidence increase under the trainer’s care, so too does its fighting spirit.

And as he was explaining all this to me, describing the sexual regimen he provides, outlining the many symptoms of ill health that one must be alert to, displaying the purified water, the home-cooked foods,
the various pots, explaining that everything relies on communication and that the yard grass is the “bridge” between him and the insect (that, in other words, they understand each other in a language beyond language), Master Fang removed the lid from one of his pots and, in emphatic response to my increasingly unimaginative line of questioning, took his yard grass straw and barked orders at the cricket as if at a soldier: “This way! That way! This way! That way!” And the insect—to Michael’s and my real astonishment—responded unhesitatingly, turning left, right, left, right, a routine of exercises that, Master Fang eventually explained, increases the fighter’s flexibility, makes him limber and elastic, and shows that man and insect understand each other through the language of command as well as beyond it.

Training is a matter of nutrition, hygiene, medicine, physical therapy, and psychology. Each of these is addressed by Jia Sidao in the
Book of Crickets
, and like the principles of judging a warrior, each has been passed down through the generations of cricket lovers and amended, supplemented, and revised during its travels. Nutrition, hygiene, and medicine now rely both on principles of Chinese medicine—on the requirement to correct imbalances of the five elements with therapeutic baths and appropriate foods—and on the principles of scientific physiology, that is, on the need to find not only cooling and heating foods but also substances rich in, for example, calcium, targeted at the insect’s exoskeleton.

And that’s what Master Fang told me the last time we met. A wild cricket is always superior to one raised from eggs in captivity, he said. And when I asked him why, he answered that the wild animal imbibes specific qualities from the soils of its birth. I at once thought I was hearing him identify a quality in wildness that I also like to hold on to, an ineffable, holistic quality that escapes molecular logic. Hearing this response reminded me of Igarapé Guariba, that village in the Amazon invaded by yellow summer butterflies, and how when Seu Benedito felt ill and prepared remedies for himself, he would leave the mixture outside, near the river, for several days in a capped soda bottle to absorb the nighttime air. That impressed me greatly because to me the bottle was sealed and nothing could enter, but to Seu Benedito those days under the changing sky were a vital ingredient, as essential to the mixture as any of
the roots and leaves. But when I asked Master Fang what exactly it was that the cricket absorbed from his environment—Did it get strong by fighting against a difficult climate or inhospitable soil? Were there perhaps atmospheric spirits that fortified its own fighting spirit?—his response was entirely without mystery: the best crickets come not from the harshest soils but from the most nourishing; their characteristic physical powers are a result of their early nutrition; you should look at the soil before you collect; you should know the quality of the earth from which the animal comes; you should administer baths and supplements accordingly.

And as sometimes happened when the topic became more specialized, Michael and I found ourselves in an area in which the experts disagreed. Xiao Fu, an antiques dealer, recently returned from his annual cricket collecting trip to Shandong, explained that the northern crickets are strong precisely because of the harshness of the dry environment against which they have to battle. Mr. Zhang, who generously spent a day taking us to cricket markets in Shanghai, impressing us with his considerable bargaining skills and sharing his substantial knowledge of cricket culture, also preferred wild crickets to home raised but explained that the wild insects absorb their spirit and “soul” from the elements in which they are raised, from the earth, air, wind, and water.

Some months later, when I read Jia Sidao’s
Book of Crickets
, I discovered that the terms in which Jia described the ecological relationship between land and insect were difficult to specify, that he left room for all these views, but that, like most of the people we talked to about this, he, too, insisted on the importance of the initial environment to the insect’s fighting quality. His discussion of this point won approval from his modern editor, who, though quick to criticize unscientific lapses in the 800-year-old text, interjected only that there was in fact more ecological variation in the crickets’ range than Jia had known of and then, no doubt wisely, declined to arbitrate.

Crickets leap into Shanghai in early August and stay until November. Michael often referred to these three months as the “happy times,” and it
took me a while to realize he wasn’t translating this term literally from our conversations with cricket people but extracting it from the pleasure he heard in their accounts. It was an evocative translation, far better than my very English “cricket season.” Even if it ignored the anxieties of what for many was the highlight and sometimes the very purpose of the year, “happy times” captured those irrefutable delights of cricket culture: the play and the camaraderie, the expertise in a world of arcane knowledge, the intimate connection with another species, the willing abandonment to obsession, the security of an erudition that reached back many centuries, and of course, the circulation of money and its possibilities.

The happy times are tethered to the rhythms of the lunisolar calendar, which are themselves tied to the lives of insects.
Li qiu
, the nominal start of autumn, in early August, is also the time when the crickets in eastern China undergo their seventh and final molt. They are now mature and sexually active, and males are able to sing and—as their color darkens and they gain strength over the following days—ready to fight.