Market Economy: Crickets and a Cuckatoo

December 27, 2007 | Category: China

Cricket Connoiseur
I’ve spent most of the past two months barricaded in my apartment, nothing to sustain me but a few jars of Nescafe and a cabinet full of instant noodles, in a vain last-minute push to patch together a master’s thesis before the end of UC Berkeley’s fall semester. The deadline missed, I’ve decided to cleanse myself of the crushing sense of failure by adopting a new look for the blog and finally posting this series of long-neglected photos.

The pictures come from a slog through the Beijing back alleys I undertook last October with a pair of friends who wanted to visit the city’s shockingly not-yet-defunct four great pastimes markets.

“Four great pastimes” refers to Old Beijing’s four most popular living fetish objects: flowers, birds (chiefly pigeons), fish and insects (chiefly crickets). Chinese opera may be reeling in the massively multi-player online game whirlwind, but it appears the bugs and birds have held their own. According to one old-timer I talked to, there are as many as a dozen of these markets scattered around the city. We planned to see three but, too fascinated to move with the necessary speed, only managed to visit two: the relatively well-known Guanyuan Market (官园市场), near the Fuchengmen subway station in southwest Beijing, and smaller market, the Pigeon Lover’s Paradise (爱鸽乐园), part of a ramshackle “urban village” buried in the half-developed regions further south.

The big thing at Pigeon Lover’s Paradise is…pigeons. Pigeons for racing. Pigeons for keeping on rooftops like Ghost Dog. Pigeons for eating. (A really fast racing pigeon will dent your wallet to the tune $400; didn’t ask about the culinary variety but presume it’s cheaper.) When we visited, there was also much being made of the wutong (梧桐), or Japanese Grosbeak, a type of finch typically captured in the southern migration from Manchuria that, with the right care and feeding over the course of a few weeks, can be taught to retrieve multiple small metal balls tossed one after the other great distances into the air. Even better, however, was a shaggy-feathered cockatoo that had, through some astounding cross-species cultural osmosis, learned to distinguish between Chinese and foreigners and would yell “Hello!!!!” at the later with all the infuriating force of a Great Wall souvenir huckster.

There was a wutong or two at Guanyuan as well, but the emphasis there is squarely on crickets. They offer both the fighting xishuai (蟋蟀) and musical guoguo (蝈蝈) varieties, the later a relatively massive, shiver-inspiring creature available in green (录) and grey (or “iron,” 铁) iterations. They also sell the full arsenal of cricket-related equipment: miniature feeding spoons, gourd carrying cases, single horse hair prods, etc. One cricket peddler at Guanyuan insisted young people are as crazy for the insects as any of the city’s tottering retirees. We greeted this pronouncement with due skepticism, at least until a few minutes later, when a group of bespectacled teenagers strolled up and started scrutinizing the merchandise like Chuck Taylor-wearing indie music geeks in a low-rent Chicago record shop.

Seems highly unlikely a cricket fighting revival will knock World of Warcraft off the top of the Chinese violent entertainment ladder, at least not until the government decides enough is enough and unleashes the full fury of the Net Nanny on the bare behinds of the country’s Web-zombified high school students. Still, it’s nice to know a few of the young-uns are keeping the flame of tradition alive.

Click here to see the slideshow.

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