Place： East Garden Hutong
Character：Uncle Sun
Each morning, Second Brother’s Roast Lamb Leg sets up tables by the road and serves breakfast to the hutong’s sleepy residents. On a particularly clear fall morning a Russian accordion melody has been added to the canteen’s cacophony of boiling broth, sizzling fried dough, and grumbling cars.
“Just fooling around,” says Uncle Sun pumping his accordion. He’s parked on a folding chair between two cars. In front of him is a music stand with several pages. He used bring his 30-lbs accordion to the nearby park to play, but after taking a tumble a few months ago Sun has had a difficult time carrying the instrument beyond his doorstep. “I started playing when I was young and put it down for 30 or 40 years.”
“When I was young, I used to catch crickets crickets this big,” Uncle Sun spreads his thumb and pointer a good three inches apart. “Now the city’s urbanized, and the crickets are only this big.” His fingers close to an inch. “the only place you can go to get the good crickets is Ningyang County in Shandong Province.”
Every year he travels to Shandong with a few thousand renminbi and buys two hundred crickets to bring back to Beijing to fight.”Cricket fighting represents Beijing the best,” Uncle Sun insists with a flash of life in his bloodshot, baggy eyes, “taking care of pigeons, fish, or dogs, is ok. But the real challenge is insects.”
Uncle Sun knows all the tricks to buying, raising, fighting, and betting on crickets. He recalls in detail how Shanghai cricket fighters would cheat using fine calligraphy brushes to add glue to their crickets’ pincers. In those most high-stakes fights 10,000 renminbi would disappear in a matter of seconds. Uncle Sun has read books on raising and fighting crickets dating back to the Ming Dynasty, and today he surfs Xishuai.com for his cricket fighting information.
He takes us insider his courtyard which he shares with 3 other families. He pours us a cup of tea and shows us the lines of cricket cages he owns, all empty. Sun laments how many Qing Dynasty porcelain cricket cages were smashed during the Cultural Revolution. There aren’t crickets in the cages. He hasn’t been to buy a new batch for almost a year now. We go back outside.
As cars continue to squeeze past kicking up dust, Uncle Sun takes up his accordion again. Drills and hammers join the tune as the hutong’s construction crews arrive to renovate dilapidated house. Second Brother’s Roast Lamb Leg has broken down their tables to make way for the traffic that will soon fill the hutong.
You cannot catch any more crickets here, but you can fly to Shandong to buy them.
