The Cricket Fighter: Part 2
The old man then places a set of miniature tools on the coffee table. “Can you guess what these are for?” He shows me what looks like a ball of cotton on the end of a paintbrush and a dustpan that looked like it was built for the miniature family from The Borrowers. “You would never pick up a cricket with your hand – their legs are too easy to snap. You use this down ball to tap them into this container and scoop them up.”
Liu picks up the next utensil. “This is for cleaning.” Again, about the length of a pencil, this fingernail-sized shovel is a dollhouse poop ‘n’ scoop that the character Arietti could have owned. Finally, he reaches down to pick up his most important fighting tool. It was the one I was most interested in hearing about, for its role in the actual fight.
But first, a word of explanation. A cricket fight is not the gladiatorial melee you’re imagining. The winner is the insect that flaps its wings first or forces its opponent to turn away. A more violent battle can result in an amputated tooth or leg. Tooth length and thickness of the neck are the most important features for winning a fight. The crickets need to be strong biters.
Click to read part 1 of The Cricket Fighter
Weight is also an important factor. Like wrestlers, the crickets fight in different classes determined by a miniature scale that uses measurements only understood within the cricket-fighting community. “I don’t have a clue about what crickets weigh in grams,” Liu says as he shows me his scale. A small tin bucket about the size of a pepper shaker hangs off a stick marked at different weight intervals.
Once in the ring, the cricket coaches maneuver their fighters with blades of grass or wiry animal hairs, tickling their legs, stimulating them, and getting them angry. “If two crickets of the same sex touch antennas in the wild, they will fight. If they are of the opposite sex, they will chirp,” Liu says, demonstrating the throaty noise.
Getting the crickets to touch antennas or trick them into thinking an antenna is brushing up against them is how the fight is instigated inside the ceramic ring. That’s why the blades of grass are employed. A cricket coach’s tickling technique is key to the outcome of a fight. Winning is a combined effort of the cricket and its master.
Which brings us back to Liu’s secret tool for tickling his fighters. Instead of using grass, he uses three rat whiskers inserted into the end of a pencil-sized wooden shaft. The rat whiskers, similar in texture to a cricket’s antennas, very closely simulate the stimulation a cricket would receive in the wild.
Liu’s finest champion once fought more than ten fights in a row. This is astounding, considering that crickets don’t live more than a year and are usually useless after one fight.
“I feed them to my chickens,” says Liu of the losers. “Useless! Eliminated! Out to the birds!” He stands up, getting excited again, panting. In a few months, his birds will be feasting on the hundreds of crickets vanquished in the elimination rounds.
The eyes also determine a good cricket. “It’s like when you look at Mike Tyson,” Liu tells me as he relaxes back in his chair. “A good cricket trainer knows a badass cricket when he looks into its eyes.”
Click to see more photos of Cricket Liu and his exciting hobby
“I’ve been doing this since I was a boy. And let me tell you a secret I discovered,” Liu leans in again to whisper. “I would find my best crickets in graveyards. This was before there was anything outside the Second Ring Road. My friends and I would brave our fears of the dead and go at night. Thorns would scratch deep into our arms as we listened for the crickets. If you heard der der der, then it was a group of crickets. But if you heard bzz bzz bzz, it was a solitary cricket. And that was your fighter! The one who scares the others away, ha ha hargh!”
Liu’s laughter turns into hacking. He sighs, leans back and clears his throat. “I’m tired. I get up at five every morning to feed these animals. Tourists spend all day in my house.” He coughs again.
“Ni hao,” a parakeet chirps from the other room.
Liu is determined to continue raising his animals and train his crickets. Growing up in Beijing after the end of the Qing dynasty, Liu told me, there were no toys. Kids played with birds and animals. They made up games with the dung beetles found on horse droppings that littered the streets. They also fought crickets. The losing kid would forfeit his cricket’s house to the winner. It’s clear that Liu’s pets are childhood pleasures he has held onto tightly as they help him find purpose. As for the tourists that tire him, Liu has one comment: “They feed my pets. The damn birds have to eat too!”
Bespoke Beijing runs a hutong tour that swings by Cricket Liu’s house. For details, see Bespoke-beijing.com.
A version of this article appeared in the May 2013 issue of the Beijinger
Photos: Mitchell Pe Masilun