YANJI (CHINA), JULY 11: Wearing a red jacket, black stockings and high heels, a North Korean waitress takes orders from a group of South Koreans, smiling at her country's enemies as she describes the dishes on the menu.But ignoring the culinary descriptions, the South Korean businessmen are instead mesmerised by the red badge on her jacket which bears the face of Pyongyang's deified former leader Kim Il-Sung. Formally at war for nearly half a century, ordinary citizens of South and North Korea seldom get to meet each other, and certainly not in so social an atmosphere.Selected government officials from both sides meet in the border truce village of Panmunjom, between the two Koreas, and vice ministers meet occasionally for talks in Beijing or Geneva. But this bustling restaurant in eastern China, 28 km from North Korea's border, provides a forum for the two peoples - demonised for decades by each others' propaganda machines - to get to know each other.The waitress takes the men's orders and skipsoff, reappearing with a banquet of North Korean food and drink. ``Won't you sing us a song?'' one of the businessmen at the table asks. She smiles, and makes her way over to one side of the room where there is a microphone, a turntable and an amplifier. She belts out a popular North Korean song called `Welcome' to the applause of the customers at Mulan Peak restaurant in Yanji, a town of 8,00,000 people, more than 40 percent of them are ethnic Koreans.The world of difference between people from either side of the world's last Cold War frontier has been brought sharply home to the South Koreans. While the first ever tourist links between the two countries were forged last year with the launch of cruise tours to the North, the tightly controlled itinerary is designed to avoid accidental meetings between North and South Koreans.When they do get talking in such an atmosphere, the results can be catastrophic. Last month a South Korean housewife was detained and interrogated for six days by North Koreanauthorities after telling a government nature warden that North Korean defectors were prospering in the South. But in the Mulan Peak, South Koreans can talk freely to the North Korean staff, who have crossed over from the North in the hope of earning enough money to help their families eat.``Are you married?'' a South Korean man says, flirting with a North Korean waitress in her early 20s. ``No,'' she answers easily. ``I want to get married to a South Korean.'' Surprised, the man asks: ``Why a South Korean? Aren't there any North Korean men?'' She smiles. ``Of course there are, but the reunification of Korea will come one day and so I will wait for a South Korean.''But the mood suddenly changes when a South Korean guest asks an indiscreet political question about the North Korean famine. The smile of the waitress, who had seconds earlier been chatting freely about her family and life in the North, freezes before she turns her back and walks away. ``They are very professional and everybody here believesthey are North Korean agents,'' said a local ethnic-Korean businessman called Kim, adding that the women were after any information from visiting South Koreans. The waitress meanwhile climbs back onto the stage and sings another song, called `Our wish is reunification.' The song is often sung on both sides of the border, providing one of the only sentiments bringing together the Stalinist North and capitalist South.
