"Topsy-Turks": Memories of an Insect Text/Wang Junjun

　　In march, a hundred flowers bloom. After a few thorough rains, the wind blows, the air is fragrant, the willows compete to bloom new green, the peach blossoms and apricot blossoms are crowded together, full of splendid embroidery, the wheat fields are as green as the blue sea, and the distant mountains are as green as daisy. As far as the eye can see, the natural world is full of thriving scenes.

　　"Poetry Sutra, Feng Feng, July" Cloud: "The day of the third is in the air, and the day of the fourth is to raise the toe." "In this season, the farmers begin to prepare tools, and they have to go to the fields to work. When adults go out to work, and when children are unattended, they are usually taken to the fields to play. When I was young, people generally lived in poverty, especially rural children's toys, and nature was their best place to entertain. On a warm day, the adults stooped down and worked diligently to hoe the grass in the wheat fields; the children often rejoiced in the fields and played carefree games. Playing with insect formulas is one of the fun things in memory.

　　We Guanzhong people often call the nests of insect animals "nests", and the nests of formula formulas are called "formula formula nests". Formula nests are generally distributed in fields and soil slopes with more barren grass. The adults toiled in the green ocean, the children crouched on the ridges, gently brushing away the bushes of weeds, their eyes tightly sweeping the ground, looking carefully... It didn't seem to take much effort to find a little bit of the surface in front of us, slightly different from the surroundings - there was a circular earthen cover the size of our little fingernails... That's right, it must be a formula nest! We gently opened the lid door, a hole in the chopsticks thick of the dark cave was then exposed to the sky, hand twisted a fine hairy grass, probed into the hole, the mouth was almost close to the ground, we excitedly shouted at the small cave: "Formula formula cover, come upstairs, don't go upstairs to pull the cover..." Usually, waiting for a short time, there is a small worm of dry grass color, similar to spiders, slowly climbing up the hole along the stalk of the fine grass...

　　Some time ago, I casually flipped through the "Upside Down" article of the Tang Dynasty Duan Chengshi's "Youyang Miscellaneous Tricks and Insects", and felt that the insects recorded by the author were very similar to the "formula formulas" I played with when I was a child. The book records that before the author lived in the study, he could find a lot of turbulence after each rain. The so-called upside down is a kind of insect nest called upside down. The nest is as deep as an earthworm hole, woven into a mesh inside, and outside the nest there is a soil cover as flat as the ground, and the soil cover is the size of an elm pod (also called an elm qian'er). This insect often hides under the soil cover with its head on its back, waiting for flies, inchworms and other small insects to pass by, suddenly flipping the cave cover and jumping out of the ground, quickly catching them, just grabbing the prey into the cave, it immediately closes the cover door, and the cave returns to the same color as the surface of the earth, and there is no gap in sight. The author goes on to explain that the upside-down look is like the kind of spider in the messy silk web in the corner. When children in Guanzhong in the Tang Dynasty played games, they often hummed nursery rhymes like this: "Upside down when guarding the door, the lycolic Kou Ru has nowhere to run." "It means, upside down, you defend the cave door so strongly (I can't open it), and when the cockroaches (i.e., the earth bees) attack, see where you can hide?" After the Tang Dynasty, many ancients used this insect to enter the classic when creating poetry to enhance artistic expression. For example, the Song Dynasty Fan Chengda's poem "Six Words of Asking for Rest and Fasting" reads: "I am afraid that butterflies will dream together, and I will laugh at Fu Fu as a gatekeeper." The Qing Dynasty Wang Fuzhi's "Poetry of The Curse of TheOry" says: "That is, the closed and upside-down household is in the vault valley, and there is no lack of sound of hesitation." And so on.

　　The insect "upside down" and its living habits recorded in the ancient books above are very clear. Today, we search for the rural people in Guanzhong, but they do not know that there is an insect called "Bumpy Dang". Compared with the current climate, the climate in Guanzhong in the Tang Dynasty is not much different, and it should not be the result of slight changes in the phenological environment that led to the extinction of such insects. So it is speculated that it is likely that its name has changed with the times. Through the investigation, it can be seen that in the memories of the older people in the Guanzhong area, many people have been exposed to insect "formula formulas" when they were children, and their images are very similar to "upside down", and the content of nursery rhymes they sing is also somewhat similar to the ancient book records. Therefore, I think that the few nursery rhymes and games that we sang in the wild when we were children can supplement and annotate the realistic scene of the Tang Dynasty Guanzhong nursery rhyme recorded in "Youyang Miscellaneous Tricks".

　　The nest of formula formulas should be very deep. We have a local proverb that says, "The lid of the heavenly scorpion is a bucket deep; the formula formula nests, and the well is deep." "The townspeople, based on what they see in their daily lives, speculate and describe the depth of the formula hole, as deep as a well. For the Kanchu Beishan area, when it comes to "the well is so deep", it means that the cave is very deep. The villagers have lived in the local area for a long time, and their claims have a certain truth. We know that the cliff surface of the earthen cave dwellings where people generally live will basically exceed six or seven meters in height. However, I have seen first-hand the tiny holes drilled by this small insect, which can penetrate the hard and thick soil layer of the cave. Therefore, people living in earth caves must always inspect and strengthen the back of the caves, especially for the geological disasters caused by the formula caves that need to be repaired in time. I remember when I first went to school, the village elementary school was located in a pit cave. That autumn rain was abundant, and one day in class, a sharp-eyed classmate suddenly found that there were several small holes in the wall of the classroom that were slowly dripping muddy water--it should be that the rainwater on the cliff surface was guided into the cave after several old formula nests. The scene frightened several teachers, who hurriedly rang the bell to get us home early from school. Afterwards, the villagers in our village decided to raise funds and choose another site to rebuild a new primary school.