Free Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles Page B

trainers, gamblers, event sponsors, entomologists, and all kinds of experts. By the time we sat down to eat in the Luxurious Garden,we already knew two of the Reversals and suspected the third, and my question was supposed to be an uncontroversial conversation starter. But Mr. Wu was having none of it. Like so many people we met in Shanghai, he wanted us to understand how deep was the world of Chinese cricket fighting—and how shallow were our questions.

2.
    As everyone knows, the speed of urban growth and transformation in Shanghai is stunning. In less than one generation, the fields that gave the crickets a home have all but gone. Now, dense ranks of giant apartment buildings, elongated boxes with baroque and neoclassical flourishes, stretch pink and gray in every direction, past the ends of the newly built metro lines, past even the ends of the suburban bus routes. The spectacular neon waterfront of Pudong, the symbol of Shanghai’s drive to seize the future, is barely twenty years old but already under revision. I marvel at the brash bravery of the Pearl Oriental Tower, the kinetic multicoloredrocket ship that dominates the dazzling skyline, and think how impossible it would be to build something so bold yet so whimsical in New York. Michael and his college-age friends laugh. “We’re a bit tired of it, actually,” Michael says.

    But they also know nostalgia. Only a few years ago, in what seems like another world, they helped fathers and uncles collect and raise crickets in their neighborhoods, among close circles of friends, in and out of one another’s homes and alleyways, sharing a daily life that the high-rise apartments have already mostly banished. Downtown, remnants of that life are visible in pockets not yet rebuilt or thematized. Sometimes, though, residents are merely waiting, surrounded by their neighbors’ rubble, holding out against forced relocation to distant suburbs as the government clears more housing, now for the spectacle of Expo 2010.
    Eleven miles from the city center and a crowded fifteen-minute bus ride from the huge metro terminus at Xinzhuang, the township of Qibao is a different kind of neighborhood. An official heritage attraction, a stroll through a past disavowed for its feudalism during the Cultural Revolution but now embraced for its folkloric national culture, Qibao is newly elegant, with canals and bridges, narrow pedestrianized streets lined with reconstructed Ming- and Qing-dynasty buildings, storefronts selling all kinds of snack foods, teas, and craft goods to Shanghainese and other visitors, and a set of specimen buildings skillfully renovated as sites of living culture: a temple with Han-, Tang-, and Ming-dynasty architectural features, a weaving workshop, an ancient teahouse, a famous wine distillery, and—in a house built specifically for the sport by the great Qing emperor Qianlong—Shanghai’s only museum dedicated to fighting crickets.
    All these crickets were collected here in Qibao, says Master Fang, the museum’s director, standing behind a table laden with hundreds of gray clay pots, each containing one fighting male and, in some cases, its female sex partner. Qibao’s crickets were famous throughout East Asia, he tells us, a product of the township’s rich soil. But since the fields here were built on in 2000, crickets have been harder to find. Master Fang’s two white-uniformed assistants fill the insects’ miniature water bowls with pipettes, and we humans all drink pleasantly astringent tea made from his recipe of seven medicinal herbs.

    Master Fang has considerable presence, the brim of his white canvas hat rakishly angled, his jade pendant and rings, his intense gaze, his animated storytelling, his throaty laugh. Michael and I are drawn to him immediately and hang on his words. “Master Fang is a cricket
master
,” confides his assistant Ms. Zhao. “He has forty years’ experience. There is no one more able to instruct you about