Insectopedia (17 page)

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, his lively features crowned with what I can only describe as a mane of silver hair. Several people
were already there when we arrived, and he swiftly corralled us all in his office, all the while pointing out the prizes from his lifelong passion: the cricket-themed paintings, poems, and calligraphy created by him and his friends that enlivened the walls and bookcases, the large collection of southern cricket pots, which are the focus of one of his four published books on cricket-related matters.
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The professor ushered 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 to 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 were tormenting the insect, which more often than not simply stood still and suffered my attentions. But I obliged and 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 somehow, from somewhere, produced digital cameras and were lined up in formation, snapping away at close range like paparazzi at a premiere. Michael too! 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 …

Maybe I’m unusually dense about this kind of thing, perhaps insufficently entrepreneurial. It was only later, on the crowded bus back to the metro with Michael and Li Jun, a smart young reporter whom Dr. Li had invited to join us for lunch, chattering away about my research and my impressions of Shanghai, that it dawned on me what was going on. Even Michael, who, it seems, had merely wanted to capture the moment, was startled by my naïveté.

A few days later, under the headline “Anthropologist Studying Human-Insect Relations, U.S. Professor Wants to Publish a Book on Crickets,” Li Jun’s article appeared in the mass-circulation
Shanghai Evening Post.
The photo caption, adapting a well-known saying, read “United by their love of crickets, these two strangers immediately became friends.”
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Li Jun subtly traced Dr. Li’s erudition. She noted his eager recourse to
the yellowing books on his shelves, his willingness to take me on as his acolyte as well as his friend. (“Questions flew out of his mouth like bullets,” she wrote of my reaction to the crickets.) She identified Dr. Li as one of Shanghai’s modern literati, a person of refinement cultivating a set of scholarly arts, among which the contemplation, appreciation, and manipulation of what I would call nature—and which includes the judging, training, and fighting of crickets—have long figured prominently.
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In offering me guidance, she wrote, 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. And she was right to do so, because without pointing to those capacities and desires, the rest didn’t make sense.

Dr. Li grew up in Shanghai, and like other men of his generation whom I met, his early fascination with crickets had been sparked and nurtured by an older brother. He describes passing the large (now long-gone) cricket market at Cheng Huang Miao every day on his way to school in the late 1940s; he remembers using his pocket money to buy crickets; he fondly recalls the circle of insect friends (
chong you
) that grew around him, boys his own age and, from time to time, the adults who would stop to play with them.

At twenty, he graduated from the Shanghai Film Academy and was
assigned to the Shanghai Science and Education Film Studio, where he developed his skills as a cameraman and animator. In the mid-1980s, he was appointed professor of photography and animation arts at Jiao Tong University.

We didn’t talk about this, and he doesn’t discuss it in his writing, but the history of Shanghai during this period is well known: the falling out of favor of the cosmopolitan city that had given birth to the Chinese Communist Party; the never-implemented plan to dismantle the metropolis and disperse a population rendered suspect by the city’s decadent colonial past; the forced closure of hundreds of its factories, schools, and hospitals and the relocation of 2 million of its residents during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; the city’s precipitous decline and stagnation until its belated incorporation into Deng’s reform strategy with the Pudong policy of 1992; its spectacular return to eclipse Hong Kong, looking out across the East China Sea not only toward the West but toward Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.
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And all the while, Li Shijun cultivated his passion for crickets. He married, raised a family, carried out his responsibilities, advanced his career, expanded his cricket-loving circle, and refused to gamble. He told the story of how he would wander his Shanghai neighborhood seeking a cricket partner, someone willing to pit his insect against his own, but to do so without staking money. Time after time he was rebuffed. He offered to fight simply “for exercise,” just for practice, but no one would place his animal at risk without potential reward. He returned home dejected, embittered by the “poor condition of the world around him.” It was then that his wife, seeing his distress, made herself his special
chong you
, and there, alone in their apartment, together they fought crickets.
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This was the early 1980s, as the restless wake of the Cultural Revolution gave way to the new turbulence of reform. Cricket fighting was already experiencing the stirrings of a revival that would bring teams of enthusiasts from Jiao Tong and Fudan universities for intervarsity competitions at Dr. Li’s apartment, where his wife and daughter would prepare lavish banquets (as they did for Michael and me) and nurture a sort of cricket salon under the professor’s patronage and sponsorship, a salon of real friends, he wrote, not the kind of friends one makes through gambling, who fall out over money and become strangers forever.
Unlike those gamblers who travel together, collect together, fight together, but keep their own knowledge secret from one another, these cricket lovers share their experience. They are a circle of constant friends united by their love for crickets, a circle of men among whom he is the acknowledged big brother.

I can’t shake Dr. Li’s image of himself and his wife in their Shanghai apartment, refugees from the deterioration they sensed all around them yet on the cusp of a florescence in the activity they love, which is fueled not by a return to the elite traditions of cricket culture he values so highly but by a relaxing of moral codes and a rising tide of both surplus income and financial desperation, a rich matrix for the regeneration of gambling, the source of so much of Dr. Li’s anxiety. And this is all deeply ironic for the professor, as well as disturbing and perhaps disorienting, because for Li Shijun the care and combat of crickets is a matter of
yi qing yue xing
, which corresponds to something like the cultivation of moral character, the elevation of one’s self and, by extension, of society as a whole.

Both in person and in his writings, the professor is direct. At the end of his book
Fifty Taboos of Cricket Collecting
(don’t buy a cricket whose jaws are shaped like the character
, 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, and so on), he remarks that it is 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 is compelled—for fear of appearing ridiculous—to wear slippers, T-shirt, and shorts like everyone else. The lack of cultivation—evident in the smoking, cursing, and spitting all around him—is not simply a personal matter: “If you want others to treat you with respect you must first act decently,” he insists.
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Nor is it merely a question of deportment. The circle he is creating is both a refuge and an example. There is, he says, a crisis of civility in Chinese society, and cricket fighting, with its long history as a cultivated art, is a discipline, a spiritual road, the ideal vehicle for the cultivation and elevation of the self. With its traditions, knowledge, and scholarly demands, cricket fighting is a rare practice, more akin to tai chi than mahjong. But it is a practice debased by gambling. How nightmarish that an activity so elevated has become the vehicle of such degeneration.

Campaigns against gambling have been a feature of the People’s Republic since the liberation. But despite periodically aggressive policing and especially since the post-Mao reforms, the party has had little success in controlling its expansion. Unlike the attempt to outlaw mahjong, which failed during the 1980s, the assault on crickets has been indirect, paralleling policy during the Ming and Qing dynasties, when imperial prohibitions ran up against the emerging professional network of urban cricket houses and legislation targeted gambling rather than crickets.
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Even during the Cultural Revolution, cricket fighting wasn’t formally banned. However, as Master Fang and others recalled, one way or another it was driven to the margins. Except for small children, no one could find time for crickets; even when lives remained relatively intact, adults were too busy attending meetings. But there was no ambiguity about gambling. It was violently disavowed as a feudal evil, a vice with particularly tenacious roots in Chinese society. And it was through its association with gambling and elite corruption that cricket fighting suffered—through its affinity with a complex of indulgences marked as male (sex, drugs, drink, easy money; luxuriance, hedonism, or whatever gesture might be possible in its direction). In other words, crickets suffered through their association with social evils that—like the cricket fighting on which they were both parasitic and enabling—were distinguished by their cultural and historical depth, by what was understood to be their profound Chineseness.

Despite the uncompromising public line, party people I talked with were pragmatic about the anti-gambling campaigns. Journalists and scholars, they responded to the issue as engaged intellectuals, debating whether gambling was a product of poverty and would thus wither away as income increased (an argument shadowed by anxieties about escalating inequalities) and whether its recent resurgence was due to the explosive combination of higher disposable income and chronic underemployment resulting from the shuttering of state enterprises. Cricket fighting had a peculiar status in this debate. Thoroughly contaminated by gambling, it was also the source of a new and highly valued commodity: traditional culture. With the flush of money and a giddy sense of a physical world disappearing before their eyes, a new nostalgia seemed to be gripping the burgeoning urban middle class. New value was being
conferred on vernacular architecture, classical painting, antique ceramics, scholars’ rocks, teahouses, and other material histories. One sign was the vigorous trade in counterfeit imperial antiques for the domestic market. If there was ever a moment to promote those elevating elements of cricket fighting to which Dr. Li had devoted so much of his life, this was it.

We were surrounded by abundance. The delicious sixteen-course lunch prepared by Dr. Li’s wife and daughter sat mostly uneaten. 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 traveling to the countryside to donate equipment and teach villagers how to distinguish among different insect species. The village he was working with was on the same latitude as Ninyang, and he had every reason to expect its crickets to be as strong as Shandong’s. The pilot project had produced promising results. It was now only a question of convincing the buying public.