This is Bill Tsutsui with another Postcard from Asia from the KU Center for East Asian Studies.

It ain’t over until the fat cricket sings. OK, maybe not the fat cricket but the cricket with the loudest and deepest sound. At least, that’s the way it is in the world of Chinese cricket singing competition. Cricket keeping is a time-honored tradition here in China: Tang Dynasty princelings kept crickets in the 7th Century. Then, in the 20th Century, Mao condemned it as a pastime of the dissipated elite and it pretty much disappeared. Now it’s making a comeback and, in a 21st Century twist, some cricket owners are using performance-enhancing drugs to slow the wing vibration rate and lower the pitch to prize-winning levels. Certainly using drugs in any sport is bad modeling but, I don’t know, it doesn’t get any more “not cricket” than this.

With thanks to Randi Hacker for this text, from the KU Center for East Asian Studies, I’m Bill Tsutsui. Wish you were here.