Some weeks after I met Shanxi Kuo, I ventured out again, this time on a mission to Dongtai Road to buy foo dogs. These would sit on either side of my front door to keep away the demons, as befits a Chinese house. I weaved through the lanes, passing one stone great house after another until I got to a very poor section of town with two-story wooden homes squashed together and crowded with people. I zigzagged my way through and emerged at Dongtai Road, home of one of the city's antiques markets. I found my little bronze dogs easily at the stalls, amid the jumble of porcelain bookends, 1920s advertising posters, Mao memorabilia, fake bound-feet shoes, 1930s radios, and copies of bright-red nineteenth-century wooden baskets and bathtubs.

I was wandering out to Xizang Road, feeling the satisfaction of having haggled a good price for the dogs, when I noticed flower sellers on the other side of the street and crossed over to look for plants. It was then that I spied, behind the flowers, deep in a low, Quonset hut–type building, something far more exotic.

I squeezed sideways down a narrow entrance between stalls stacked with glass fishbowls, tanks, tubes, and sacks of fish pellets, stepping over tubs of aquarium plants and finally emerging into one of the last remaining truly antique Chinese worlds in Shanghai: the Xizang Road fighting-cricket market.

All around me was a cacophony of animals. To my left huddled makeshift stalls with cages of puppies; to my right, stacked one on top of another, were small glass tanks filled with minuscule baby hamsters with hands no bigger than pinheads, scurryingly alive. Huge wooden cages housed fat gray chinchillas lumbering about. Tiny wire cages imprisoned hyperactive squirrels and darting chipmunks. The turtle seller slept, his head down on a table littered with fishbowls of different sizes in which all manner and girth of freshwater and even sea turtles were swimming. Stall after stall of birds, the preferred pet of elderly Chinese men, in wooden antique birdcages—finches, doves, cockatoos, and crows—shrieked discordantly. Huge sacks of different birdseeds in greens and browns lined the narrow walkways between the stalls. The ground was wet, slimy, and horrible to contemplate. Birds screeched, kittens mewed, aquariums hummed, hawkers shouted, but above it all pulsed one mournful, almost deafening whir—the sound of a thousand chirping crickets. I looked around to see them and suddenly realized that they were everywhere, in round little rattan baskets strung together like Christmas lights, hanging from stall entrances. Here also were tables of cricket accoutrements: earthenware jars, tiny round food dishes the size of quarters, tiny wooden prods. I pushed to the back of the market, which opened to a wide area where a group of mostly men were gathered, huddled in tight circles, cigarettes hanging from their lips, the smoke funneling up into the air as they peered down fixedly at something. I hovered near, stood on tiptoes, and saw two crickets in the ring, waving their whiplike antennae.