Booknotes

Ms. BARBARA CROSSETTE, AUTHOR, "THE GREAT HILL STATIONS OF ASIA": Well, they were resorts and places of escape built by colonial administrators, all of them--us, the British, the French and even the Dutch--during the years before malaria medicine, before air conditioning, even before mass travel, when people who were posted out to the colonies found themselves dying and their children dying, and so they looked for someplace to seek refuge.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, people keep asking me this, and I think I--between 16 and 18 are sort of described in some way, are mentioned, but there were so many. There were dozens and dozens in India alone, and I refer to some of the others. There--some that were strictly resort areas and sanitarium centers and some were --actually became centers of government in the colonies during the worst months of the year.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, I--for several reasons. I like to think that there's a lot about colonial life we still don't know. A lot about colonial history has been written in--for political reasons and, obviously, for reasons of geopolitics. We talk about colonial empires and things, and we talk about them as some extension of government policy or whatever. But the people who peopled them were very interesting. And the longer you live in these places and see, in fact, the local people recreating and rediscovering their history in the colonial period--the more you see how much there is about the ordinary folks, you know, the people whose babies died, who were too far from home to be able to go back to England or France or wherever they lived. Also, because I began to see that there were similarities in the way that the various European or we were included sort of as Europeans--colonial people dealt with life in the tropics, because these places were largely all tropical climates, and how they--without even knowing what other people were doing--had some of the same reactions and tried some of the same cures.

Ms. CROSSETTE: I've been there about four years now. It'll be four years in the fall.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Oh, that's almost 25 years ago--exactly 25 years ago, in fact, this year. I came from--I'd worked for a newspaper in Britain called the Birmingham Post. I'm an--American born but had spent some time in Europe, and came back in 1973, I must admit, at a time when big media organizations in the States were opening more to women. And the peculiarity was that I had got jobs in England that I thought I couldn't have got here, where they kind of shoved you into recipes and fashion and so on, and when I came back, people say to me, `Where did you get all this experience writing about politics or war?' or whatever it happened to be. And it was odd that I had gone to a very chauvinist society, which was Britain in the '60s and '70s, although it was a time when the country was opening, and was able to come back directly to The New York Times.

Ms. CROSSETTE: I was born in Philadelphia and raised in the suburbs and out in the country in eastern Pennsylvania. My father's family pioneered eastern Pennsylvania. They were Mennonites dissenters, who came when William Penn really opened the colony to people who had trouble everywhere. They came from the Rhineland-Palatinate and some of them from Switzerland. They stopped off in the Netherlands, and then in the early 18th century, they got on boats and came out because, you know, William Penn's Quakers were great at finance and they built schools, they were intellectuals, they were businesspeople. But my father's--describes his ancestors as `plow jockeys.' They were people who were able to do the farming and feed the city of Philadelphia--their farm markets became very well-known and built lovely old farm houses in the countryside around the city.

Ms. CROSSETTE: I think when I was in high school. The other side of that story is that my mother was a refugee from Europe, so--after the First World War, so that I had--we always--I always had a sort of cognizance of things foreign because during the Second World War, though--I was born in 1939, so I was a very small child, but I do have memories of, for example, sending food packages even after the war, the idea of thinking about these people all the time, what they've gone through, being told by people, being visited by people from Europe in the household.

And in high school, I began to listen--one of my teen-age boyfriends built me a short-wave radio as a gift one time. He didn't have any money, and he put it together himself. And it was terrific because I would sit at night in my room and send away--you know, they'd say, `Send postcards.' I'm sure they have a file on me somewhere in the FBI because, you know, Radio Bulgaria, Radio Moscow--but all these were wonderful. I listened to Hawaii calls. I, for some reason, got into a great fascination for things foreign. We didn't have the money that I could travel abroad. My father went to great lengths to take us places that he thought we would like to see. He drove me all the way to Prince Edward Island once to see the house where "Anne of Green Gables" was written. And so I was obviously fascinated by things outside.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, it's complicated. It was the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time. She was born basically with a Hungarian passport, German-speaking, in what is now Slovakia, in the Tatra Mountains. It's absolutely beautiful, beautiful part of the world.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Her father was killed in the First World War Her mother had done the sort of grand tour of America when she was much younger, at the turn of the century. And so she remembered that there were sort of vaguely relatives in Philadelphia, so she literally took her two children and made her way across Europe to, I think it was Hamburg, and got a ship. And they came to Ellis Island, and that's how she arrived here in the 1920s.

Ms. CROSSETTE: My mother's dead now. My father's still alive. He's 94 and still very active.

Ms. CROSSETTE: He was mostly in business. He had a paper box factory, and he worked for--earlier on for a larger concern in Philadelphia. His avocation became, in later life, when he was retired, the formation of a group called the Mennonite Historians of Eastern Pennsylvania to try to preserve--'cause Mennonites were, as I said, not intellectuals on the whole--to try to preserve the local history, they opened a museum in that part. These were not the plain people. His church were normally dressed reformed Mennonites. But so much of their history and their language, Pennsylvania Dutch, is disappearing or disappeared.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, strange places like Bulgaria. The music sounded wonderful. They-- I had no special order of priorities. In high school, I--what really began to change my life, oddly enough, was a high school history teacher. As you know, we all have teachers who have made a huge difference. Her name was Doris Felty--Doris Hallman later. She interested me in Asia for the first time. At a small rural high school in Pennsylvania, it was--it was extraordinary. But I wrote a term paper on Japan and became utterly fascinated. And I think that's the one place I wanted to go more than anywhere else.

Later on, I spent time in the Western Pacific, and I was married and living on a Navy base in Guam, where my son was born. And I got to Japan for the first time, and I remember writing to her and saying how I had sort of finally fulfilled this ambition and traveled in Japan for the better part of a month, and it was fabulous. I came back, in fact, and tried to switch into Japanese studies in college, and I met resistance because I had no languages and so on in that area. Naturally, this was not something that a small-town person would've had. But I stayed with it and ultimately got back to Asia in other ways.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yes, I got a--my first degree at a small college in Pennsylvania called Muhlenberg, which was a little college but had good teachers who actually taught. We had small classes, a great library, a nice environment, wrong town. I keep saying if they'd moved Muhlenberg to Connecticut, we'd have had a better reputation because it was a--Allentown, Pennsylvania's a very, again, kind of ordinary town with not much of an intellectual history, when you consider Philadelphia has so many great areas of scholarship around it.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yes. General--yeah, they--well, the Muhlenberg family was quite--quite well-known here in American history, yes. General Peter Muhlenberg was--whose statue was on--and I'm not sure, but there were--yes, it was him or it was one of his relatives, but that's true.

Ms. CROSSETTE: And than I got a mas...

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yeah. Then in--I was--my then-husband was sent to Colorado--he was still in the military, and as young men were at that time, because it was still the age when, when you came out of college, you did military service. And I went to the University of Colorado on a fellowship and got a master's degree. At that point, I became interested in European history 'cause, again, it depends on the professors and the teachers. Colorado's not a great academic institution for the study of history, but I had a combination then of Latin America and British history, which made me very interested, again, back to colonial Pennsylvania, when the Qua--the period when the Quakers came and founded the colony, and so I went from there, then, briefly to England. And I wanted to be a graduate student and start over at the University of London, but instead, I began to work as a journalist and I've never looked back.

Ms. CROSSETTE: I guess my first--oh, if you don't count Canada...

Ms. CROSSETTE: ...my first overseas trip was England, and it would've been in 1965, when I was hoping to be a graduate student. Oh, I remember--I remember it was Icelandic Air because that's what everybody took who could--who couldn't afford--who couldn't--well, ships were still there, but it was cheap to fly. And it was an--I remember it was an endless flight.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Prop. And, you know--yes, and we stopped in Reykjavik, which was in itself--I mean, for me, everything was exciting. And flying down across Scotland, we landed in Glasgow, I think--yes, we did, on this flight, rather than anywhere in the London area. And I remember that was the time when there were lots of folk musicians here who were very famous. It's a--it's an interesting awakening. And one of the songs that I now wish I could remember who sang was "Little Boxes." It might have been The Kingston Trio. `Little boxes made of ticky-tack. Little boxes and they all look just the same.'

Ms. CROSSETTE: Pete Seeger maybe.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Anyway, the--I had all the '60s, I think, ideas, you know. It was the sort of hair shirt American complex, like we have somehow done everything wrong. We have--you know, our suburbs are boring, our interference in the world is negative. And this is one of the first times when I thought, my God, you know, you'd fly over into these cities in Britain and they are little boxes made of ticky-tack and they all look just the same. So in other words, I guess I first began to see that we are not so uniquely awful in many ways. And maybe I've became too positive over the years about American life, but from there on, I've learned a lot about how much we don't know about other countries.

Ms. CROSSETTE: I've lived a lot of my life--at one point, I decided I had probably lived most of my life overseas. I've been back now since--off--since '91 technically, but I've been traveling a lot. I've lived in Britain for eight years and spent a lot of time in Europe and in the Middle East. And then I lived in--I came back here in 1973. I was here a while. In 19--the early 1980s, for The Times, I spent some time in Central America, again not based there, and in the Caribbean, but traveling there for a period of three or four months one year and various periods other years. In 1980, I decided that a missing link in my life was India because, you know, I had lived in Britain and I had met so many Indians and I had met Pakistanis. And the American experience is completely outside India, and I think that's why we're so fascinated with tales of the Raj and things because it's a mystical kind of fantastic world for us 'cause we had no family contact with India.

Ms. CROSSETTE: The British period--the British--well, Raj is--yeah, it really means ` the rule,' and so the British Raj--but the Indians would say--I mean, they say license Raj, meaning bureaucrats are in charge or use the word just whoever--whoever's in charge.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, from the 17th century, even earlier if you look at some early explorations, up until--really until 1947 in South Asia, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and then a little later in Malaysia and Singapore--Malaya, then it was the Malayan Peninsula. So in 1980, I took leave from The Times. I got a Fulbright Fellowship to teach in India at a university, which struck me as an absolutely fine way to learn about a country rather than going as a tourist. Particularly India is just too overwhelming to go for a week or two and expect to come back with more than just huge sense impressions and maybe a stomachache. But I saw--I taught, unfortunately, in a new city, Chandigarh, which was built in North India to compensate when the Punjab state was broken into two and half was given to Pakistan. The capital went with it, Lahore, which is a fabulous city. And that was really such a heartland for Punjabis, Sikhs, Hindus and others.

I went to Chandigarh, which the Indians, after independence, called in Le Corbusier to design a new capital. It's something that wouldn't happen now because he was a foreigner and he brought foreign architects. He used Indians also. Anyway, he created a whole new city, and they had a new university built there. And that's where I was assigned to teach journalism for two terms. So it was not Indian in the sense that it was a new creation, recent--relatively new, but you could also see how Indians were making it Indian. They had begun to change the houses and they had begun to deal with--and it was actually a subject for archeological and architectural and art historian students to see how India moved in and kind of covered over Corbusier's in--Chandigarh. But it was a chance to live in India, even though it was not old India in the same sense that living in Calcutta would've been.

Ms. CROSSETTE: I wrote about six in India. In fact, because when I was in Chandigarh, this was the first occasion I had to discover hill stations. In Chandigarh, I--it was not too long a trip to Simla, which was the great British hill station. And I went there and, in fact, from Chandigarh, I saw my first hill station on the hill at night, just lights on the top of a ridge, and it was Kasauli, and so I was fascinated by this. And while I was based there, I went to Simla several times and began to get familiar with this genre. Then in later periods, I've--I went to Sri Lanka. When I went back to India as a correspondent, I really got off the track about having lived abroad. When I came back, I began to agitate to go back as a correspondent to India, which didn't happen until 1988. In the meantime, I had been sent to Southeast Asia for four years, so I lived in Bangkok, and I did all the Indo-Chinese countries--Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Indonesia and Malaysia and so on. And there I began to see everybody had hill stations. I wasn't aware of this.

Ms. CROSSETTE: The town of Simla now is really a city in the hills and it's--many others are a few thousand people. The problem is that a lot of people come--let's say if you have a hill station like one in the south with 10,000 residents. In the summer, you may double that population in a day by--with visitors, the Indian summer, in the hot season, very...

Ms. CROSSETTE: They're usually--they're in a plateau or on a top of a ridge or down the side of a hill. It was interesting that--this is one area where colonial people differed. In the United--when the United States decided to build one quite late in the game, early in this century, in Baguio in the Philippines, the very wise planners who were chosen to do this by the United States government--this was just after, of course, the Philippines reverted to--or was seized by the United States in the Spanish-American War, depending on how you look at it. They decided, `Don't touch the top of the hill because this will spoil the setting,' and they were right, and so they insisted that Baguio be built lower down.

The British in India tended to go right for the crest of a hill and often would build a mall or promenade with views, often on two or three sides. And they would put up there their church and perhaps a library and some guest houses and eventually some private homes and hotels. In other places, the terrain was more plateaulike. The Dal--in Da Lat in Vietnam, the French built on a rather--just a--like a high valley. And in Nuwara Eliya in Sri Lanka, it was built really sort of among tea plantations, again, on a higher elevation but not on the top of a hill in the same way. Some of the most difficult ones to reach in India are literally built on precipices. You really have to struggle to get up to them, even now. And it's one thing that's kept some of them from being too overpopulated.

Ms. CROSSETTE: You--and this is one of the reasons that people went to the hills, I think. I mean, the idea of living in the tropics--automatically you have heat. And if you're not disposing of waste, waste water, garbage and things like that, you--properly, you're going to have this problem. And there--and in many parts of cities in Asia, in South Asia more than Southeast Asia, which, of course, leaped way ahead in the '60s and '70s and '80s, you simply don't have public services. You have an overpopulated town or city, people coming in from the countryside thinking that that is even better than the villages they live in. You have a lack of public services or, I might say, sewage systems that date back to the colonial times. In Hanoi, the sewage system, once when I was last there, was beginning to get into the water supply system because the pipes were corroding. The the colonial powers often did build this kind of--hateful word--`infrastructure,' but it nothing's happened to it since, and a lot of it's just simply broken down. So you have a combination of the tremendous heat in these places, a lot of heavy rain at some times of the year, a lack of public services and sanitation and overcrowding. And it's inevitable that you're going to get this kind of a situation.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Sounds like an olfactory tour, doesn't it? Yes, same thing. In Jakarta, there are neighborhoods where--the other thing is open sewers. There--these still exist in Asia, where literally people use them as toilets, where all kinds of runoff from shops--people will wash the front of a shop and simply throw the garbage out into a kind of drain that runs along the side of the road. There are lots of places where this is still the sewage system, you know.

And the more overcrowded--it's sort of a self-defeating--the more overcrowded it gets, the more difficult it is to dig up these cities and put in anything new. I might add now, you're talking about South Asia here, where they are now nuclear powers and their people are not getting clean water or simple sanitation. And I think more than half the people of India don't have access to a toilet. I--there are hundreds of millions of people below the world's lowest poverty lines. And so there are some real questions there, and real questions about what priorities these countries set themselves in--in how they wanna develop.

I always felt particularly lucky to have lived in Southeast Asia and then in South Asia twice because the Southeast Asians, for whatever reasons, tackled many of their social problems much earlier. And I find that whatever financial crisis they are now--have now been going through, they have a huge cushion to bounce back on. They've cut their population. They've got better education systems. They have a much more egalitarian outlook on life, an open view to the world.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Bangkok--I lived in Bangkok for four years, although, as I said, I was responsible for about a dozen countries, and Thailand was one of the first to really tackle birth control and did it with huge success. It's a happy-go-lucky country with a great deal of Buddhist egalitarianism, a sense--a high sense of tolerance, no prudery about what you needed for birth control. In fact, the king of--he's called `the condom king' in Bangkok, you probably heard of him, Kun Mechai. He even, in fact, runs a restaurant to raise money for his community projects. And when you leave, instead of a bowl of mints, there is a bowl of condoms. The idea that the Thais could face up to and talk realistically about what needed to be done. This is, by the way, also helping them now battle AIDS 'cause they had a big problem.

Thailand--Indonesia was actually developing and--in some similar ways, although again it's a Muslim country with a different kind of philosophical base and, of course, had military governments or strongmen, two of them, dominating their history until this year. But, in fact, one can argue that the revolution that has overthrown President Suharto in Indonesia, in many ways, had its roots and I think what Crane Brinton once called `the revolution of rising expectations.' You know, you begin to raise people and they want more. Or as a Singaporan told me, `When the tummy is full, the mind gets hungry.' So a lot of these people--Malaysia has a First World standard of living.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Malaysia's about--I guess just under 20 million people now, 16 million, 18 million people last when I lived there. It's not so big geographically. It has the Malay Peninsula, but it also has a large part of Borneo and...

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yes. Singapore, which was part of Malaysia--part of the Malay Federation at one point. It's got--it's between Thailand and Singapore.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Mm-hmm.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, he--yes, he was a--one of the finest of British administrators to go out to the colonies. And I used a lot of Raffles not just for--really, more for Indonesia, as you know, than a--for anywhere else because for a brief time the British took over Dutch Indonesia and--in the 19th century, and Raffles was sent as an administrator there during that British hiatus, and in that short time he demonstrated, in many ways, he's a colonial. And a lot of people want to run these people down because, basically, their sense was that, `We can do this better than these people can. We can run this place. We can--we can'--but he was a Renaissance man.

He was interested in everything. He climbed around the ruins of Java. In fact, there were a lot of British colonial and French colonial administrators who discovered ruins that'd been lost for centuries in Southeast Asia and took that kind of British Museum mentality, `Let's find out what this is. Let's clear away the rubble. Let's look at this civilization.' Flora, fauna--everything interested him--everything. He would get on horses. He would walk through swamps. He was--he wrote some fine books on Indonesia, on Java, and then he was sent to Sumatra later on. He's the founder of Singapore--modern Singapore, really, Sir Stamford Raffles. And his life was not long, but he accomplished an awful lot.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, Lee Kuan...

Ms. CROSSETTE: Lee Kuan Yew was, really, the father of modern Singapore, and as I mention in the book, I was always sorry that I had--because I hadn't read much Raffles, that I didn't ask Lee Kuan Yew about Stamford Raffles. Singapore, as you know, is a city-state, so it has no back country, it has no agriculture. Its only resource, as he is fond of saying over and over again, is people--its own people.

Ms. CROSSETTE: 2.5 million now, 3--under 3 million--under 3 million. His idea was that in order to make Singapore count when it broke away from the Malay--Malaysia Federation, he--the development of people was what was going to make the difference, and he did. He did this with education, with the attraction--attracting businesses, creating a banking center. And then he did some very interesting things. He went for corruption, an Asian problem everywhere. It he made it absolutely illegal. He began to chip away at what were sometimes vaguely called Asian business practices. He paid his bureaucracy, he paid his civil servants. He created a marvelous island there of First World living. Singaporans, I think, are on a par or above many--some--several of the countries of the European Union in standard of living.

Now Lee Kuan Yew, however--he and his party, the People's Action Party--he simply believed that only he and only the PAP was able to carry this on. And so he also, I might add, broke down the potential for ethnic strife because Singapore is largely Chinese, but it's also Malay and it's also Indian, particularly South Indian Tamils, who came during the British period and afterwards, and Sri Lankan Tamils, who fled some of the problems there.

So he created an idea of Singapore that was--that was multiethnic, way ahead of his time, and sort of rammed it down their throats. But he--public housing--fantastic public housing, even way ahead of the curve. So when he sees that people are getting old and living longer, he designs nanny--granny flats so that you can have--not he personally, but--so that you can have a little family and a little place for Granny so that the family looks after, as in Chinese tradition or Asian tradition, the older people, that there's some way that you can account for this. Fantastic housing program.

But politically, he simply --he is paralyzed by the fear of political dissent and political confusion. He wants to see a nice, orderly system where one party is in charge and they have a token opposition. And this is why, as I said earlier, the Singaporan scholar said to me, `He doesn't understand that when his tummy is full the mind gets hungry,' and that Singapore, well-educated, well-fed, well-housed people, naturally they want a little something else, and politics is very interesting to many people. They have many well-educated people. And he has always come down so hard on this that it's almost inexplicable. He's now a senior minister. He's out of direct government, but he's still there.

Ms. CROSSETTE: I don't know. Yeah, I imagine so. I just don't know.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yeah. Yeah.

Ms. CROSSETTE: He's also been asked to give advice to China, I mean, talking about big--much bigger countries. In Vietnam, he would have had to clean out a corrupt bureaucracy. He would have had to have a more professional civil service. He would have had--one thing his party is PAP; you may--your allegiance to the party and your voting may have mattered in Singapore, but it wasn't ideological in the sense that the Vietnamese cannot get rid of the ideology that is getting in the way.

I just read a wonderful piece not long ago about how the Vietnamese are resisting--we--you know, we like to talk about transparency. They said, `Why does anyone need to know our production figures?' You know, the idea that the international investment community has to know things. And it's still--the leadership in North Vietnam is a--basically, a very Stalinist leadership and long-living. They--some of them are still there, and they simply are operating on the old Communist attitudes. And they can put up their new slogans and talk about all their economic liberalism, but at heart, they're still complete control freaks. And with this has come a system that is not really open; it's open on paper, but not so open in a--and some investors are backing away.

But Li Quan Yu's main focus would be on making government work by paying people enough so that they are not corruptible, by streamlining laws, by finding out how the world works, high technology, by investing in a lot of things that makes the country first class, that even however small you are--and in the case of Vietnam, there aren't--not dissimilarities, 'cause they are overpopulated. I mean, Li Quan Yu's little island is sort of full. But they are his--they--in fact, they're building it. If you fly over Singapore, you can see them actually adding to it, you know, with landfill to try to try to make it bigger.

But--and he's worked out how to use a city very effectively to allow green space, to have beautiful highways with flowers. He's helped by the tropical climate; he's on the equator.

Ms. CROSSETTE: '73.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, it's always a--one is always fortunate to work for The New York Times because, in most places, they understand that they're dealing with a large newspaper, and that even though they may not particularly want to deal with a woman---and this is not in many places anymore, I don't think--they know they're dealing with an institution. You sort of become an honorary man or you become a--you become a representative of The New York Times without regard to gender.

I have found that--people ask me about what it's like to work, particularly in--I was in Pakistan and have done some reporting in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I've never worked in the Middle East, but--except, you know, on sort of odd visits, including this year in Iraq for the first time, I spent time. I find even there, the institution, if they know that they're a--dealing with the international press and they feel it's important to deal with the international press and they recognize The New York Times--and, I might add, the International Herald Tribune because things we write appear in that. And some people think I work for the International Herald Tribune, not The New York Times then they deal with you that way.

I find people in politics, the more Democratic, the better because, obviously, they understand that porting--putting your view is not a bad thing. And with global investment, they know that it's not bad to be cooperative to a reporter who may say something good about your country in The New York Times. This may matter. And I also find, being a woman, I can meet a lot of women. And at the grassroots level in election time, at--in various ways, I've learned a lot from traveling with women running for Parliament, for example, in Pakistan, which made the social problem easier for me. I could stay in her home; I could go with her on constituency visits. And I learned a lot. I think sometimes women at the grassroots are more honest about the economic and political situation; they're not looking over their shoulder at some local political boss. It has great advantages.

You--if you--you have--in my generation, anyway, have had to, you know, sort of to do some of the things that we've done and reported on family issues and so on, you do notice things: the quality of children's teeth; do they have shoes? You--as in Calcutta or some other place, despite the high pronouncements of modern technology and so on of the Indian government, you see an awful lot of people who aren't living that way. And I think a lot of this comes from knowing people in their homes and in their neighborhoods.

Ms. CROSSETTE: No.

Ms. CROSSETTE: No--no special reason. It's interesting, I suppose because I had no--I mean, if I dedicate it to anyone, I probably would have dedicated it to the memory of all those people who slogged away in these places.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yeah, well, in--no, in the tropical colonies. Much as we berate them now for being tools of imperialism and so on, life was very, very tough, and many of them lost such precious things that--all their children; you know, people died young; the death rate was extraordinary--and also sometimes lost their minds, literally, and certainly lost their health going out to the colonies. And so it's--and also the people who tried to chronicle this. It's--there are just too many of them.

Ms. CROSSETTE: My son.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Oh, boy, Jonathan is now 37 years old, yes.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, he went to school in Britain, and then he went to a Quaker boarding school here in this country, but he--where, of course, they didn't have to wear short pants, but in England, he certainly did. He went through many a winter there with cold knees. And so when we went to--this was when I was there as a--teaching in university. He came out to stay with me.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yeah, in India. And we went to one of the schools in the hills, which were great institutions, and it was about the most uncomfortable place we had ever been. So these kids were, as I said, hardened to short pants. He was still, nonetheless, impressed.

Ms. CROSSETTE: That's my husband, David Wigg.

Ms. CROSSETTE: He's also a journal--been a journalist and a writer, most recently with the World Bank. He did some reports in the developing world for them. He gave up a job--he's British. In fact, through him, I learned also a lot about the British empire and learned a bit about, you know, the sort of folklore that's carried around in the heads of a lot of Britons who have either family or a personal or a neighborhood or whatever connections with empire. He came out with me to Asia and was a freelance reporter for British and for American newspapers while we were there.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Since the--late in '78. He always said, `You're gonna forget our anniversary,' and he's right, so don't ask.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yes.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yes, this--the hill stations, I had been to all of them except, I think, maybe one, Kalimpong--oh, Ootacamund--I hadn't been to Ooty for some odd reason when I was out there, so I was going back to them all. I took three months off to do this book, and I went by myself because it was a lot of sort of hard-slog travel. And my husband's not totally happy always in South Asia. He would have probably come along to Southeast Asia. We go back to Southeast Asia every year for at least a month. This year, we went to Laos in between two trips I did to Baghdad, which was truly bizarre. But nonetheless, that's what we did. So I set off at the beginning of January and I traveled for two months, and then...

Ms. CROSSETTE: This was a year ago, in '97. And then I came back in the third month with enough time to really get the book in shape so that I, then, had to do--I had to--started to do a lot of research and so on, but I--as I traveled, I took a laptop and I wrote. And while I was traveling, I realized that the key to this book is gonna be the introduction because you have to tie this disparate group of places together. You have to explain to an American what these places are. You know, I'd say, `I'm doing a book on the hill stations,' and they'd say, `Was that like trekking?' because, again, this is in the British colonial experience, but not in the American. And unless anyone knew Baguio in the Philippines, which was not called a hill station, necessarily, and which is now quite a large city and it's no longer what it was, people just don't know what these are.

And I was--I had found out that since locals were rediscovering them, that now might be the time to go back and have a look at them myself and tie up two things, the threads of the different colonial rulers and how they reacted in the same way, as I said, to the terrible lives they had to lead, often, and just also why these little hill stations are still alive and are, in fact, growing, growing too fast, because people have some of this--if you lived in Calcutta now, you might go to Darjeeling and Kalimpong for the same reason that somebody in the 18th or 19th century would have tried to go to the hills to get away from the same things, and more so now--industrial pollution, automobile pollution. They are becoming good places to go and in an economic crisis, cheap.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Right, in Mussoorie.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Mussoorie is a--straight north of Bali. You drive for about half a day, and you--it's in the Himalayan foothills.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, I did--you can go by bus. One of the things about hill stations is you almost always have to go by road.

Ms. CROSSETTE: No airports, except the lot has an airport about a half an hour away in Vietnam, and I think there may be one other one. But anyway, mostly it's roads, so it's bus or car. From--I went, I will admit, luxuriously; I hired a car and driver in Delhi. And...

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yeah, it always was all my expense. This was in--I gave myself a trip around the world, let's be honest here. And since I was working full time and I got the time off, I thought, `Well'--and I had to be expeditious about this because I had to do a lot of traveling. So I--and I've done the buses and trains into the hills. The other thing was toy trains--what they call toy trains--British are great at this--incredible engineering projects. You build these little trains that snaked up. The most famous one is probably--well, there're two, the one to Shimla and the one to Darjeeling. But I went to Mussoorie by car. And I--you know, I had chosen months that I knew in some places was going to be colder than other places, but I felt I had to go to Mussoorie; I had not been there for a long time.

Ms. CROSSETTE: I start at Delhi, and you drive up to Dehra Dun. I mean, there really is no big city. That's another thing, so that it's a--they're way off the tourist track, usually. You just go straight up through Uttar Pradesh, which is one of the disaster areas of India, in terms of development. I mean, it's got some good agricultural land and so on, but it's a--it's been politically mismanaged; it has horrendous social indicators. It's the kind of place in India that--where--these places in India like the south where they have conquered a lot of social problems, and they see this mushrooming of people being born below the poverty line and lots of social problems.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Most people are...

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yes. Yeah. Bigger than an awful lot of countries.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Tiger.

Ms. CROSSETTE: The political leadership and its--some of the problems now are so large that it's--it's a--you have to wonder whether it's possible to deal with them in any foreseeable future. The political leadership in Pradesh, that state, has been very bad, corrupt. The equivalent of the state police have been brutal. There have been attacks on Muslims--the minority Muslims. There have been all sorts of--all sorts of things have happened. And there's a huge amount of corruption and bribery, as we discovered.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Go ahead.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, there is democracy in India. I mean, people still have the courage to go out and vote. But there are gangs who will intimidate voters. There are also gangs hired by politicians. There are also people who basically pay for votes in one form or another. It's democratic in that there are polls and there are elections and so on. But in people's access to things, in the lack of services, the democracy is not delivering on what it's promised. And there is a police--a state police force which is--really can be very brutal, used by politicians when necessary.

Ms. CROSSETTE: I think--I can't remember exactly, but , probably about five hours. Everything in India takes five hours, I always figured, by car.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Not bad through UP because it's--well, there are no really big highways in India. This is another problem that they have in trying to attract investment and so on. So there're two-lane roads almost all the way up there. You start out OK around Delhi and then you get into--and the two-lane roads go--plow right in the middle of bazaars and towns and so on, you know, and then right across fields, so you get to see a nice cross section of the agricultural life and so on. And then when you hit the hills, there are no big highways into the hills. They're all--except in Pakistan, in--up to Muree it's not a big highway, but the Pakistanis have focused on roads, and they're much safer and they're much more comfortable. Then you get on very narrow--narrow roads, and inevitably on these hill stations you sometimes do 2,000- or 3,000-feet climb in the last--the last maybe quarter or less of the trip.

So the roads are very windy, they're precipitous, because often they come out on the outside of curves and there's nothing but maybe a rock, or nothing at all between you and the abyss. Huge buses come tootling down the other side. People get terribly sick. I always tell people, if you're gonna travel on the hills or the Himalayas, in general, and you're prone to that, you've gotta really be careful. And it goes on and on, and then eventually you arrive, and the hill stations themselves usually have a lot of pedestrian area or very narrow roads, sometimes horse trails. So you're at, really, the end of the transportation system by the time you get there.

Ms. CROSSETTE: At night, in the snow. Oh, it was terrible. But, you know, it's a...

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, it star--it's still operating as a hotel. It's still, I think, locally owned, as far as I know. It's the kinda hotel that's prime property, though, to be snapped up by a hotel chain. The Taj Group in India, which runs the Savoy and Ootacamund, another hill station--no relation to the other Savoy, at least as far as I know, not yet--they have bought--grabbed some of these old places and have put in the comforts of sort of a modern five-star hotel. Not too much, but enough--enough to make things work, so you can have a hot shower and...

Ms. CROSSETTE: In Mussoorie? Well, it's a marvelous old barn of a place, a beautiful old lodge in the mountains, but with almost nothing working--electricity, you know--and it was bitterly cold. This was also, to be fair, an extremely unusual winter. I also had some of the same problem later on in Darjeeling, although it wasn't as cold. The Himalayan foothills to the south that winter had had a very great deal of snowfall. I was, in fact, snowed in in Muree, which is over in Pakistan but along the same kind of frontal area. But the Savoy is wonderful in that it's a--it's all there, you know, sort of the old dining hall and ballroom and the rooms are suites. At the time when--the same time that people traveled with trunks, you know, and got on steamers, you know, the kind of place that have two or three wardrobes for all your clothes, because you came to stay a while, and lovely grounds to walk on. Even in the snow in the morning, it was--it's extremely attractive, views of the high Himalayas across one whole area. I could stand at my room and check my little sort of relief map and you could see one peak after another, 20,000 feet or higher.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, one of the things that I have battled for a long time is a sort of glib definition of Americanization. You know, people say, `This place is being Americanized or Westernized.' In fact, you can use hill stations, which are being schlocked, I mean, in some ways, up by people who don't want funky, old-fashioned places with string quartets. You know, they want karaoke bars and casinos and stuff like that. So--and that's--that is coming from within those societies themselves. That's not--but what is Americanization? You know, I'd say to people--they'd say, `Well, you know, Coca-Cola, you know, rock,' whatever. It--you know, it's not. It's--it is, but it isn't. And some of these things are--come from--it's human rights, it's the rule of law, it's the fact that the education system--we run it down all the time, but basically it works. Why do so many people want to come here? Because they know that when they come--if September comes around, the school's open and the children go to school, you turn the tap and the water comes out, electricity works, that the police have problems, but that there is a police force that, if your house is burglarized, you don't have to go down to the police station and bargain for how much money you have to pay for them even to register the case, people don't steal the stamps off your envelopes--I mean, the sense of civil society that works.

One hopes we're not losing it in the--in our sort of fragmentation and whatever we do, but that these things are what many foreigners would say is the Americanization that they wouldn't mind more of, as well as, we see the kind of things that made the country strong--local participation in government. You know, many places in the Third World that I've worked and lived, if something happens to the central government, the country kind of comes to a standstill, or can.

I've often said it abroad that if a whole cabinet and the president were regrettably wiped out here or some awful thing happened in Washington, like one of the science-fiction films, people here know how to conduct their business all the way down to the--to small villages. I have a house in Pennsylvania now, in a small town. Decisions are made there about things that affect us that we don't have to wait for some political leader farther up the food chain to say, `This is the way it's going to be,' or, `That's the way it's going to be,' that local people still do participate--not enough--and I know there are writers in this country who are very much afraid that we've--getting out of that small-town participation mode, and it's hard to get people, for example, to be a volunteer fireman now or that kind of thing, but these things are very strong, and many of those countries have no local government.

If I have a--just a second for one story, I went with--I told--was--talked about traveling with a Pakistani member of Parliament who's a woman, and in her constituency, she--her family is quite, quite--was quite wealthy. Her father's dead. She was the only child and she was a girl, so that's why she's in politics. So if she had had a brother, she'd have been out and her brother would've taken on the sort of family political--but we went to a--one of the outlying farms in her constituency and there was a huge crowd on the-- in two bunches on the front porch, this bunch and that bun--they were obviously antagonistic, and she said, `Look at this.' She said, `They're not here because I'm--they're here because there's no local court and they have a dispute between these two families.' And she was the MP. Now she'd come down from Islamabad. They wanted a judicial decision. Somewhere else, someone comes to her with a baby who's sick, wants a medical opinion. But that--where you have no local involvement, no local government, that is a fatal flaw.

And so when we put money into democracy-building, which some people like and some people don't, instead of giving it to central governments, it seems it should be going somewhere down the line 'cause--and this is a very American thing, I think, the way we've managed our own affairs at the local level.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Oh, lots of places, but it would--there would be pro--the question is, how far down in the social scale would you find them? Now, as I said, in Singapore, you have a society where pretty much, I suppose, everything would be available, and maybe not--I don't know, you know, whether we go into a different brand of dishwasher every year, or a refrigerator. But the essential things would be there. And even in some small towns in India you're now getting--whether it's a sewing machine or a bicycle or an electric fan or maybe a small refrigerator, where electricity is reliable, that's another problem. In Bangkok, a lot of middle-class life--apartment houses, up-to-date appliances, good restaurants, plenty of--I could live--we lived in Bangkok. You--without even thinking really about living in a developing country, it's--and it doesn't have to be just the superrich elite. They live better than people live here, you know, in many cases.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yeah.

Ms. CROSSETTE: So that was in May--that was in Mandalay, in Burma, which they now want to call Myanmar, but -it's sort of a collision of the old cultures and news--new, I suppose, and in this case, particularly sort of startling one, and where they had built a marvelous new hotel and with absolutely every modern convenience, the only one in Mandalay still, I think, or maybe another one is coming up now. No, it's, again, this--the sense of public--looking after public spaces and public behavior. Lee Kuan Yew became a fanatic, of course, you know? They had in --they had laws against what they called killer litter. If you put your flowerpot out on your terrace and it fell down, you could get arrested, quite rightly, 'cause if you have a 20- or 30-story flat and you drop your flowerpot on someone's head below, this is not a funny thing. But again--laws against chewing gum, laws against urinating in elevators. Now one would think that's not something a lot of people do, but it had happened, and spitting. And this--it is--it's a health hazard apart from anything else and in areas, for example, if you have tuberculosis or whatever in the community. So--but a lot of these--a lot of Asian cities still have not--and particularly South Asia, still have not dealt with these problems and so, you know, it...

Ms. CROSSETTE: Cash some travelers' checks.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Yeah, you know, they--the--again, questions of efficiency are not--in some of the--in some of these countries, it--I shouldn't perhaps complain if the people who live there aren't complaining, but I'm sure they are. It's just that in some of these Asian countries, particularly the more successful ones--and some of it's built in from their own societies--they build very successful working societies, but everything works and that people's health is looked after, that nothing unpleasant that can be prevented happens and so on. And, again, Singapore, Malaysia, to a large degree, has done this. The Philippines is a little rougher and it's a little different, but, I mean, who are we to judge whether or not it's a good thing you have to stand in line? It's just that--it just seems to me that if it can be done by the Malaysians or the Singaporeans or if life can be made easier, this doesn't--is not just for the sake of the tourist, but this matters to people who want to come and invest or open a factory or whatever. The way a country works, how smooth the gears are, whether the electricity comes on--these things are decisions that we may whine about as tourists, but that's--that can be a big, important matter for someone who is coming in and looking at development.

Ms. CROSSETTE: That's Mussoorie. That's where I nearly froze at the Savoy Hotel. Yes, that's Mussoorie. And you see, again, they strung it along the top of the hill, thereby removing most of the trees. It's a very special profile, but again, as I said, other hill stations decided that this was a bad idea and left nature in control of the top and then moved the people down a little.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Oh, well, I still manage to run around. This year so far, I've been in Baghdad twice. I mean, I don't--that's not a garden spot. I have been in Afghanistan and some other places in between, back in Pakistan. I try very much to keep in touch, and as I said, my husband and I go back to Asia every year because you've--I've invested a lot of time and energy and effort and learned a lot, and I like to stay abreast. I mean, my big hope now is to go back and do a big book on the Indonesian people because they're coming out of the Suharto period, and if they stay on the tracks here, they have a tremendous future. And we know so little about Indonesians. They are--they're people who don't emigrate much, who have a fabulous collection of cultures that really almost exist on another planet from ours. And so it's a--it's a great undiscovered area for many Americans.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Mm-hmm.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Mm-hmm.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Mm-hmm.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Well, given, again, you--what the--all the positive factors that Chinese have brought to so many Southeast Asian societies, the Chinese are--if you can compare them, especially with India, are headed in what, my personal opinion, is the right direction on a lot of scores. It's a question of, again, a Communist system that has to be altered, and that's always the big question. But in terms of, again, village government, more rule of law, moving more toward codifying their business practices and so on, they seem to be doing quite a lot of things right. And they start with a base of absolutely energetic, very successful people.

Ms. CROSSETTE: My favorite are the easiest to get to. I guess my favorite would--well, they're all different. Nuwara Eliya in Sri Lanka, because it maintains the old--really, the old sense of the 19th century hill plantations, tea plantations. Sri Lanka Ceylon tea is still a big tea country, and so you can go up there and pretty much--and you can even stay in tea plantations now. You can pretty much almost relive, if not at least get a sense of 19th century life.

Ms. CROSSETTE: Thank you.