I spent the last few months looking into the phenomenon of the ultra-wealthy buying up adjacent townhomes in Manhattan and turning them into megamansions. It’s the extreme end of a wider trend of turning multi-family apartment buildings into single-family homes, reducing supply during an historic housing crisis. I hope you’ll check it out. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Two Kinds of Time, Graham Peck

1950 was a hell of a time to be publishing a book about China in the US. The communists had just won the civil war and America was in a panic about China “going red.” (The Korean War also began that year, but the book seems to have been finished before the war started.) And it was especially a hell of a time for Peck to be publishing a book about how everything he saw there indicated the US’s foreign policy apparatus was doing just about everything wrong.

The book did not do well, as books that tell people what they don’t want to hear usually do. It went out of print for several decades. The University of Washington Press re-issued it in 2008. The historian who wrote an affectionate introduction said he first found the book at a garage sale in the 1970s. It is still not easy to find—I got my copy via interlibrary loan—but worth seeking out. Two Kinds of Time is a brilliant book.

Two Kinds of Time was first released in 1950. It is a work of journalism more than history, but came up on several lists of best books on modern China, including those of several historians. The book covers Peck’s time deep in Nationalist China in the 1930s and early 1940s when China was at war with Japan. At the time, few westerners ventured beyond the coastal cities or comfortable enclaves controlled by Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang party. Peck went deep into the countryside, where the Guomindang was ostensibly in control but operated a form of government that alternated between comically inept and unspeakably cruel.

In China around this time, as with most of human history, life was cheap. Two Kinds of Time is littered with morbid scenes of starvation, disease and violence. Famine and corruption resulted in approximately one million Chinese nationalist troops dying on their way to the front. Untold millions died of starvation during this time due in part to corrupt allocation of food. Chiang destroyed the dikes along the Yellow River, flooding a vast area with no warning to the people living there. Hundreds of thousands likely died, all to delay the Japanese advance by about three months. If Peck’s account is to be taken literally, starving peasants dropped dead in public within shouting distance of fattened bureaucrats enjoying feasts. There appears to have been no expectation among the Chinese people at this time their government ought to help them instead of rob them or even kill them. The brilliance of Two Kinds of Time is Peck’s ability to show how the Chinese people mentally sustain through such misery and suffering, and how to plow ahead with humor and gaiety even as the very nature of existence appears to be one cruel joke after another.

I am usually wary of books without footnotes. But the more I read Two Kinds of Time, the more I understood why it has none. Much of the book is about the people Peck met and the scenes he observed. They could literally be people waiting with him for a bus, townspeople sheltering from a Japanese bombing raid, or any number of farmers he encounters along the way. Who, or what, is Peck going to cite?

Meet enough people, see enough things, and you begin to understand a place just a little bit. Here’s the trick: You have to receive what you experience with simplicity, never naivete. And Peck had this talent. He took nothing for granted and let other people do the talking. This is what made him such a great writer (and illustrator; there are dozens of elegant, affecting satirical drawings throughout the book he did himself).

To give just one example: After American soldiers started arriving in China post-Pearl Harbor, Peck hitched a ride with one in a Jeep. They saw a Chinese peasant selling rice from two buckets hanging from either side of a pole straddling his back. The peasant put the buckets down, sold some rice, and then proceeded to transfer the remaining rice from one bucket to another. He then loaded up the empty bucket with stones. The soldier ridiculed the peasant. Why not even out the rice in each bucket and have a lighter load? Why add weight? I mean, how stupid could you be?

But Peck was curious. He discovered the peasant loaded the bucket with rocks because, if the buckets are too light, they swing. Not only does this risk spilling rice, but makes walking harder than if the buckets are full of weight.

There is, of course, no footnote to source this story. For all I know, it’s a parable. Indeed, I spent most of the book wondering how much of it Peck made up, a not-uncommon practice among journalists at the time. These fears were assuaged towards the end of the book by Peck demonstrating he understood what he saw so completely he could predict the future.

Peck offered his observations on US foreign policy. He warned that backing corrupt and unpopular nationalist governments against communist uprisings would result in intractable quagmires from which the US cannot possibly emerge victoriously. He spoke of how once the US started backing the Guomindang with money and military supplies the people assumed the US would win the war for them. He said this was not a reflection of the Chinese—the better trained and properly equipped units of the Guomindang armies had fought well earlier in the war—but of the basic dynamics of the situation. He also warned this creates an inflationary spiral that erodes confidence in the government even more, the very same government the US is trying to prop up. He predicted that if the US tried this again it would end in failure.

Tragically, Peck died in 1968 after battling cancer, just long enough to see how right he had been.

There is a real “everyone is stupid except us” tone to most every westerner Peck quotes in China. They are, almost to a person, derisive and dismissive of Chinese people individually and as a group. There are many anecdotes in Two Kinds of Time that could serve as stand-ins for Western attitudes towards China, and, all too often, towards anywhere in the world considered underdeveloped, backwards, or simply different from us in any meaningful way. The bucket of rocks is as good as any.