Indeed, the face of this bleak society gives little clue to a new spirit. Mornings in Pyongyang start with melancholy notes floating from loudspeakers to awaken the city. "It's called 'The Song of Our Great Leader Kim Il Sung,' " said a government guide. "That's how our people start their morning." The song is not a call to hopeful expectations, but rather a summons to another day of resigned toil.

The high-rise cement apartment buildings seem to grow out of a morning mist of sooty smoke from wood and coal fires. A rhythmic chant comes from a group of young men already at their mandatory calisthenics. The sun struggles up red and angry from the smog.

In the evenings, residents linger outside. There is no rush to go home, for home is a drab, cramped apartment. At a city park, there is more murmur than talk, subdued and without laughter. Families spread a few dishes on a concrete plaza and eat quietly as the night wraps around them, until they are but black shapes in a darkened city.

At home, their apartments are lit by one or two bulbs or a fluorescent light. Men in undershirts and women in housedresses are at the open windows, leaning out as though to escape the gloom. Children crowd onto a single sliding board on a narrow cement playground. A few workers shovel from the pile of coal dumped outside each building, moving the fuel to the basement beside creaking furnaces.

The weak glow from the windows seems all the more dismal for the gloriously lit monuments and heroic tableaus that shimmer against the dark backdrop.

Doug Strucke, waxing poetic in a socialist realist vein,
in the Washington Post , 21 September 2002.