Dear TIME:Reader: As President Ramon Magsaysay paid a whirlwind visit to the Philippine province of Tarlac last week (see "Smiles in the Barrios" in FOREIGN NEWS), Correspondent James Bell, TIME'S new Hong Kong bureau chief, followed him in and out of a dust-coated Chrysler at each town and village. Alternately mauled, hugged, or decked in flowers by cheering crowds, Bell looked about him with more than a reporter's normal curiosity. Kansas-born, he had spent his formative years and attended high school (Brent School, class of '36) in the islands, where his father had managed a gold mine. There his parents had lived out most of the World War II years in Japanese internment.

All the twelve-hour day, riding with the President, pushing through crowds with him, Bell saw familiar scenes. When the blue peaks of the mountain province came into view, he turned to Magsaysay and said: "Legally, those mountains belong to you, but I'll always have extralegal claim to them because my mother is buried there."

Bell's mother was killed in a bombing raid in April 1945 while he was only two miles away, a Signal Corps officer attached to General Mac Arthur's staff. President Magsaysay looked at the distant mountains and said quietly that he did not object to Bell's claim. NEWLY arrived from Germany, Correspondent Bell was making the first circuit of his new beat last week. Before he moved to Bonn in 1954, he had covered an area of the Middle East encompassing roughly 5,500,000 square miles (area of the U.S.: 3,022,387 square miles). Now his domain is Southeast Asia -- Formosa, the Philippines. Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, Indo-China and Burma. And he may range as far as Australia.

From Manila, Bell flew to Singapore later in the week, went up the road to Kuala Lumpur, past villages circled with barbed wire, past check points and roadblocks set up against Commu nist terrorists. He arrived in Kuala Lumpur just as a terrorist hideout was uncovered only a two-iron shot from the ninth hole of the exclusive Selangor Golf Club (see "Ruining the Rough" in FOREIGN NEWS).

"I never get far from the Iron Cur tain, it seems," said Bell. "I covered it in Korea, from Greece, Turkey and Iran, and from Eastern Europe from 1954 until last Christmas Eve. Now I'm back to the bamboo variety."

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