When I first arrived in Shanghai years ago I got fascinated by the architecture (and twelve books later, I still am). Not surprisingly, however, it was not just Shanghai's buildings that entranced me, but also the many aspects of Chinese life about which I knew nothing. Most fascinating was my early discovery of a hobby related to little living creatures - ones that I had never even thought of raising - crickets.

Growing up without brothers or sisters, I have always loved small animals, the constant companions of my childhood. Like most American children, over the years I owned many pets, ranging from turtles and hamsters to a long line of much beloved dogs -- the last of which, Lamb Chop, still lives with me in Shanghai today. (See her tasteful photo herewith, which I like to call "If dogs could fly - I'd be a 747!") But on to the subject at hand.

In my very first Shanghai summer (1982) I was introduced to the world of crickets. While strolling along a street near the Cheng Huang Miao (the old city temple), I heard the most awful caterwaul, a loud and ear-splitting screeching that I could not dentify -- as I had never heard it before in my life! Soon I saw the source, a young peasant, and on his shoulder a bamboo pole, affixed at the end with a mass of small woven straw cages. In them were large green crickets (we call them katydids in America), most noisily sawing away with their short wings scraping against each other (not their legs, that I had always heard was the source of that sound).

Of course I immediately knew that I had to have one of these creatures, hanging like lumpy hammocks in their small cages. After tough negotiating I wound up with two jiao gugu, as the locals called them, at a total cost of less than one kuai -- with some green beans tossed into the bargain. TX-Mozilla-Status: 0009green beans, I was to learn. (But how on earth did the early owners ever stumble on that fact?) My ayi, also of Jiangsu peasant stock, of course knew this already, and it was she who taught me how to take care of crickets.

It was fortunate that she knew her stuff, as over the years the jiao gugu were supplemented by some chocolate brown ququ in their round clay pots, plus lots of huangling and jinling crickets (the tiny "golden bell" singers) about the size of half your little fingernail. At one point Ayi had to feed four biggies, two clay-potted chocolates (bred to figX-Mozilla-Status: 0009m for their singing), ten tiny golden bells, two birds, one turtle, one dog - and me! Over the years, she daily and patiently prepared a gamut of goodies, from green beans to melons, seeds to bugs, moist rice to dog food - each creature being provided the proper diet for the species - and then she wound up by cooking a meal for me. Life is not easy in creature-crowded households.

For my big crickets I bought elaborately crafted wooden cages, mostly duplexes because the big ones will chomp at anything that comes past them - including the feet and legs of their best buddies - if they are put in the same cage. (I found this out after counting legs: they would start out with six and soon have only three or four.) For your information, their "hands" (actually their front feet) have three tiny prehensile toes each, and they can quite delicately hold their green bean with the toes as they eat. I found this endlessly fascinating (perhaps I should have been an animal behaviorist?).

For the fighters/singers living in their boring clay pots, I found tiny round feeding bowls in blue and white porcelain with painted scenes, some harking back to the Qing dynasty (the raising of crickets having commenced far earlier, in Tang times). For the tiny ones there were bone-inlaid wooden boxes or, better yet, plastic containers about the size of half a cigarette pack. They came in all sorts of imaginative shapes: a glass-topped grand piano in which they were the strings, a black TV set in which they were the show, a pink car in which they were the passengers, and even a gun in which they were the tiny bullets in the barrel.

While the jolly green giants (my basses) were soon relegated to the back balcony at night so that we could sleep, the smaller crickets were placed all over my flat to provide a constant chorus, soprano and alto. But as autumn approached, they began to diminish. Cold kills, as I was to find out when I once took twenty tiny cases, inside a Cadbury tin, to the United States as hostess gifts. Those were the days before they searched everything, and I kept the little darlings quiet by jiggling the tin constantly as I went through Customs. Sadly, I just could not keep them warm enough on the plane and all but one was toes-up before I got home. The one intrepid survivor made it to Washington, but to my sorrow expired between the airport and the home of my hostess. (So much for unique gift-giving ideas.)

Conventional wisdom says that crickets live only a hundred days, but through TLC I have kept some big greens alive until Christmas. With age they actually turn from pea green to dark khaki, and they move slower and slower. Their eyes then go opaque and they can't see their food, so you must put it in their mouths. One touching anecdote: I once gave a pair to my Consul General and warned him that he would have to feed them with honey on a toothpick when they grew old. He scoffed and said that when they got that old he would simply flush them down (for insects and fish we call that a Burial at Sea). I regretfully accepted that philosophy and he got the crickets anyway. About a hundred days later I happened to walk unexpectedly into his office. There I found him, toothpick in hand, bent over a cage, trying to maneuver a blob of honey into a tiny mouth...

When the big ones (they seem to live longer) start to lean, listing to port or starboard, then you know it's all over. By now their screeching wings are agoniziingly slow and yield a rusty sound, but sometimes they saw away in one last glorious burst, usually The Night Before. The next morning you find them dark and still.

And I can not tell you how much you will miss them.