Mandarin Meter Maids

"But officer....I just stopped for some Chunghuas!"

Parking tickets may be a global scourge. But in Shanghai they're just another way the government sticks it to the growing load of car owners. In an attempt to control escalating pollution and traffic nightmares caused by China's surging love affair with the automobile, the city has imposed strict limits on the number of licenses it will issue. To register a vehicle in the first place, one must bid for a basic plate in a monthly auction. The city offers only several thousand plates each time and with some 25,000 residents bidding, prices have skyrocketed. Winners pay up to 50,000 yuan ($7700) for their tags. That's the cost of a compact sedan. How to say, "That's crazy talk" in Chinese?

Photos by Federico Darwish.

Creepy, crawly, crickety things

Forget PETCO!
Shanghai's Xizang Lu Market is a Pet Store Like No Other

Perusing the cricket department

I first heard about the Shanghai pet market from Bumble Bee, an Uno-playing third grade boy who is the gentle owner of a spider he named Butter. Butter was a birthday present from Bumble Bee’s father, who paid 100RMB ($15) for him, plus another 100RMB for accessories and feeding bugs. In Miss Jo mode, I express excessively peppy enthusiasm about this information, in part to compensate for pathetic Mandarin.  Bumble Bee responds by bringing Butter to school so I can meet him -– transported on the back of his mom’s bicycle!

Bumble Bee shows some Butter love
Bumble Bee can’t tell me Butter’s species in English, but the furry black arachno-thing is the size of a ping-pong ball and looks suspiciously like a tarantula. He travels in a clear plastic carrying case similar to the kind art students use for hauling paints. He has a bed of dried grass, a few stones and a piece of Styrofoam to hide under. “It’s his home,” Bumble Bee says affectionately. I muster admiration as the boy describes his pet’s diet of smaller insects and water.

"It's his home!"
Butter’s provenance, I'm told, is the Xizang Lu Flower and Bird Market, a ramshackle open-air bazaar where children of Shanghai have been buying their pets for decades. Located in the Old City, south of the ritzy Bund, this warren of sensory chaos is a throwback to simpler times, before the Pudong skyscrapers towered in the distance, before the BMWs blew past the groaning rickshaws.

Antique cages for your brand new tweeter.

Visitors to the Pet Market meet a crazy cacophony of birds and chirping crickets, a spectrum of smells and a heavy dose of dust. Next to enervated bunnies and a few frail dogs and cats, you'll find sparrows and parakeets in rickety unkempt cages, ferrets, mice, dark rooms of aquarium fish and some medium sized rays of questionable legality.  Scores of turtles in glass bowls appear healthier than their mammal counterparts.

Turtles, turtles everywhere.

Turns out a favorite student, Vivian, found her green turtle, Maria, here. Her classmate, Steven, got his Tom here as well. Their friend Cinderella’s pet turtle, Lisa, came from a river in the wild. Poor Lisa met her maker just last Friday. She simply stopped eating and died.

Ni hao!

Over in the bird section, an exotic parrot is blase. Why not? He's got a fabulous fake Burberry satchel. 

Dodgy denizens of the animal underworld
The market's real raison d'etre, it seems, is the cricket business –– which may account for some of the unsavory dudes hanging about.

Tickle me (Elmo) cricket
Before actually laying eyes on the crickets, you hear the racket. Hundreds of them singing (or screeching) by rubbing their wings together reach the decibel level of a jackhammer. During my first week in China I encountered a cab driver who kept two kinds of crickets on his dashboard. I thought the noise was the receipt machine stuck on print. The cricket men at the market spend hours tickling their wares with rabbit whiskers or synthetic ticklers to improve their voices. Seems the better singers are also the better fighters.

Bamboo cricket cages

The bamboo cages strung up in clusters on poles have tiny dishes of water and food for the insects. Traditionally, their Chinese minders provided the crickets little clay beds to sleep on. 

Lettuce eat! Dinner time for crickets.

Some dealers house their crickets in neat, multiple rows of small white boxes. These seem to be the fighters, as they are carefully tended and painstakingly fed individual bits of lettuce for dinner. Prices range from 30RMB to 100RMB here at the market. But offsite, where the dealers secretly keep their prize fighters, a champion can fetch many times that amount. Seems high-stakes cricket matches are swanky (and big-time illegal) events, often held in posh hotels, with wealthy Chinese executives betting on pots that can reach 2 million RMB. Talk about a racket!

Picking a winner

Thanks to Federico Darwish, photographer extraordinaire.