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Public Affairs Television "Becoming American" Interview with Maya Lin

BILL MOYERS: I can sense that you're wresting with the questions and the information because you just didn't grow up steeped in that culture. It's unusual that you were not at home made as aware of your Chinese heritage as a lot of others whom I've been interviewing who said they were.

MAYA LIN: My brother is absolutely more attuned to it than me. I think it's partly my nature. My mother would say, "You do know, you just forget."

MAYA LIN: I had a really hard time with my identity. I wanted to fit in; I wanted to be American, and for the first 20 years of my life — I remember when I was at Yale I was recruited by the Asian American Society, ASA, and I was so uncomfortable. I was foreign in that group.

If you think about it I was the only Chinese American growing up so I looked out at everyone and everyone is white. So, what would make me more uncomfortable was hanging out with a group of Chinese Americans. And I knew that this was bad, like what is wrong with you, you're Chinese American? And I remember just politely declining becoming part of ASA at the time. And it's taken me my next 20 years to really understand.

And what is ironic is my work is inspired as much by an eastern sensibility coming from my father and probably my mother. It's there but I've only recently become really aware of how in a strange way it percolated up. I think identity quietly percolated up. My father-- everything we lived with at home he made — most of the pots we ate off of, a lot of the furniture. He was a master craftsman — the joinery, the detailing was very clean — it was modern.

It was the 50's modernism, but it was also — in it's simplicity, in the shapes, in the colors — he was brought up in China so that whole aesthetic. I went to his childhood home in Fukien and it was very Japanese based. I was sort of stunned because I've always felt my aesthetic is almost at times closer to the Japanese sensibility than the Chinese sensibility. At a certain point the temple architecture in China-- and I think is more of the Baroque period -- is very flourished, and I prefer this very minimal, simple look.

And I just felt like, why is that? My mouth, my jaw was open as I walked through my father's house, the childhood home that he was brought up in, because it was laid out like a very traditional vernacular Japanese house. I found out it was also a Chinese style house — it was a mix. Apparently my grandmother, his mother, loved Japanese architecture. So, you could say that what he brought with him and was making for us is how I began to see the world.

BILL MOYERS: And is that eastern sensibility-- is that a preference, a taste for simplicity, for the natural, for connecting to the flow of the earth, the harmony?

MAYA LIN: I think so. And yet the funny thing is I've never read about Taoist thought. I've never read about Zen. Again, it's always like I don't want to make it conscious. I'm much more about intuiting it in that sense.

I think there are two things going on. One, there's the physicality of it. And yes, the simplicity. A Japanese house is a very simple form. As you're walking through the landscape, it's framing your view of the landscape-- every single step. There's this connection so you're not treating the building as it's own castle.

Think about western European tradition. It's almost the fortress against nature. If you look at a Japanese house, as you walk through the house you are being given absolute glimpses of their nature. The only irony to this is it was a very controlled attitude about nature. We can improve upon nature.

BILL MOYERS: I see that in many of the houses you've designed here where there's that very strong Japanese relationship. And the control of the environment.

MAYA LIN: Right. To me, where I'm trying to question is the interface between inside and outside. It's about: Don't create a building that shuts itself down. I want a building that is opening up so you can't tell where the house ends in a way and where I connect you back to the landscape.

And actually to me it's evolving into a pure landscape. I'm working on a house right now that literally is going to be this very simple sliver of a wood box gently stepped into the landscape. And nothing else will be touched.

The one thing that my parents did give me as far as an eastern thought and -- again, never trained. But if you look at any of the works that I do I'm very much against a didactic teaching method-- where you come in and I tell you exactly what you should be getting out of this piece. Everything that I do will be about: I will put this out here and it's up to you to come to your own conclusions.

BILL MOYERS: That's very Taoist.

MAYA LIN: That's so Taoist, never trained. I got into so much trouble. I think the main flack with the Vietnam Memorial came after the WASHINGTON POST had a great headline, "An Asian Memorial for an Asian War." It was written by a journalist who happened to really know Taoism. And he was going crazy because he was looking at this work and going, "It is so Taoist." He's talking to me and I'm going, " I don't know anything about that."

But of course it's all there because of my parents and the way we lived. Think about it: they never told us what to do. They never tried to ever say, "You can't do this." I mean, it was a very unusual upbringing.

BILL MOYERS: So, even though they didn't set you down and talk about your Chinese heritage or Asian heritage they lived their heritage in such a way that it was naturally imparted?

MAYA LIN: Absolutely. That's the only way I can reason it. It's no coincidence.

The fact that my brother is a poet, my mother is a writer, my dad is an artist, I'm in architecture. My brother and I had a really good giggle about ten years ago. A poet and a sculptor are technically not great professions in which to feed yourself. And we were joking, "Gee, maybe Mom and Dad should have made us worry about the realities of life."

But they really firmly believed that we had to grow here and that was what was really important. You had to pursue something that you really had a passion for, that you really, really loved. My mother especially was very suspect of material things.

The joke in our family is if we had gone into law or business, they might have felt less of us like, "Well, it's you're just going for the money." That would have been considered selling out. So, that's unusual. Is that Asian? I don't know. I know that they were different. There's this other side which I think is the academic scholar side.

BILL MOYERS: Your home was full of ideas. It was full of art and full of living.

MAYA LIN: Yeah, and I know that's the other side of the Chinese culture

BILL MOYERS: How so?

MAYA LIN: In China you have the intellectual scholar, and it was very highly respected and revered. The stories I know of friends of mine who basically wanted to go into the arts and their Chinese parents were just worried, terrified because how are you gonna make a living? And I think as an immigrant coming over what do you want your kids to do? You want them to be able to make a living. You're there to protect them. I think academia is it's own little protective bubble.

BILL MOYERS: Did you fit in in Athens? Did anybody ever make you feel uncomfortable there?

MAYA LIN: I didn't realize what it was. I was so miserable by the time I got to high school, and so I had pretty much retreated into my own world.

BILL MOYERS: Miserable because?

MAYA LIN: Didn't know. I was really out of place. And didn't understand why I was out of place. I mean, it seems so obvious. But if you're going through it you don't have a clue. If I look back I was probably an incredible misfit. I had friends but it wasn't like I belonged. I didn't want to date. I just wanted to study. I loved to study.

And then I was taking a lot of independent courses at the university. I was incredibly bookish. I think partly because I just wanted to get out of Athens a while. I really did not feel like I fit in. But again, I never would have figured out it's-- oh, it's because your parents are [Chinese]--I think high school was basically a traumatic experience for most people I know.

BILL MOYERS: When did race begin to matter?

MAYA LIN: When was I more aware of race? I think technically not until my late 20s, as my body of work began to grow, did I really begin to see how my voice is a voice that is very much coming out of a bicultural experience. Still, even though I'm very interested, I still don't want to consciously go back in and start reading books on Zen or Buddhism because I don't want to premeditate that creativity or second guess it.

BILL MOYERS: You just said you live in a bicultural world but that's a world where boundaries--

MAYA LIN: Don't exist.

BILL MOYERS: Or they disappear. Why did you call your book BOUNDARIES?

MAYA LIN: I think there's running liner text in the front that says, "I feel I exist on the boundaries, somewhere between an architecture east and west." So, everyone thinks boundaries and they think of the container. I'm thinking of the actual line between things. Because it's not about being divisive, it's about being truly ambivalent. You're in between; you're in the place neither here nor there.

Nobody thinks of that as a physicality. Part of the thing I like to do is get people to rethink their idea of what things are. And imagine, you're always thinking there's one and then the other. And I'm going, "Oh, what is that space? Is there a space right between that? What is that line?" Of course it doesn't exist. But if you try to make a line into a spatial conceit-- I'm asking people to rethink what the term is.

But it's all about feeling like you're in different worlds. And I think the main worlds are the east/west as well as the left-side-of-the-brain-people and right-side-of-the-brain-people.

When I started out, I was strongest in math and science. I was going to go into the sciences. I always did art because that's what I always loved doing it. Generally, I meet people that are in one world or the other. Very few tap into both sides in the art world in that sense. That ambiguity of what is the psyche just is part of what I am.

MAYA LIN: My mother is now writing the history of my family.

BILL MOYERS: Your mother is finally putting it down?

MAYA LIN: Finally putting it down, and I'm so excited. So I'm gonna start working with her on that. And then I'm gonna have to track down my father's side of the history, 'cause it is really, really important. Maybe having kids has made it more important.

BILL MOYERS: Why did you go back to his home in China?

MAYA LIN: My mother took my brother and me back. My father's health wasn't that great, so he didn't come with us, which was a little painful. We visited her uncles, one of his cousins, and one of my cousins. We were going through China. My mother had arranged it. We went to Fukien to see his home and meet up with a few more of his relatives.

BILL MOYERS: What were your emotions?

MAYA LIN: My mother never quite wanted to get stuck in southeastern Ohio in the summertime. Ohio is like 100 percent humidity and 100 degrees. It is a swamp. And she just-- she's-- she-- very Shanghai waiter. (MAYBE: She's like Shanghai water. ???) You can't change the temperature. They're delicate. And so she would always stay indoors and it's really muggy.

So we are in China, in the summer, in Fukien, and it is identical. (LAUGH) And we all started laughing because it's like, "Of course. Dad found the one place that reminded him of home."

I was in love with photography at the time and I took a lot of photographs of his childhood house 'cause I always felt a little guilty that I loved Japanese architecture and I'm Chinese. The Japanese had blown up my grandfather. There wasn't much love between the Chinese and the Japanese at that time. And there I was, like what is wrong with me? I'm inspired by Asian [culture], but it's sort of the wrong [culture]--

And there I was, in that house, realizing the circle was closed for me. I got it. I got where this aesthetic was formed by, and what my dad had given to me in a way. And that was quite strong.

BILL MOYERS: When we finished a moment ago, you said-- you could have done science, you were good in science, you were good in math. I happen to know you were first in your class. You could have become anything. You chose to be an artist. And I go to that because that's very American to me, that-- you know, we invent our lives here. We are free to compose our lives. That's really what being an American is to me.

MAYA LIN: The funny thing is there were two sides growing up. There was a very academic side, this love of academia. My parents had it, my mother more than my father. My mother was an Asian lit professor. I mean, there were books everywhere. That was what we assumed: we're gonna study, study, study.

Meanwhile, my brother and I go into my dad's ceramic studio every day after school, throwing clay at the clock to cover it up. Drove my dad crazy. I took it for granted. Every day of my life, I was making something. I never thought I would be an artist because in a weird way—[I thought] I had to get my doctorate. We've gotta get our Ph.D.'s, I mean that was sort of what I assumed would happen.

The bookish side was technically supposed to win out, right? But ironically, I chose architecture in a way because I thought it was this perfect combination of science, math and art. But the weird thing is even though I love building buildings, I'm an artist. I've been an artist from probably the first time I stepped into my dad's ceramics studio.

And that's again what they give you. My mother's a writer, my brother took off on that leg. My brother was a poet. He was the one that put Asper (PH) in front of me, Stevens in front of me, Ruroinitz (PH). He was absolutely critical in editing the text for the Vietnam Memorial. He was at Columbia [University]. There was no fax back then. I would read over the phone. I had mailed it to him, and then he had gotten it, and he was correcting it.

BILL MOYERS: Your book BOUNDARIES is a wonderful marriage of the printed text and the visual concepts. You like writing, don't you?

MAYA LIN: I love writing.

BILL MOYERS: You value writing?

MAYA LIN: I value writing. I respect it. I find it the most difficult thing for me to do, but when I'm done I am unbelievably just at peace. If you think about art as being able to share your thoughts with another, writing is totally pure.

MAYA LIN: Writing is one of the purest arts, not to say that sculpture isn't. But the medium has no weight. The medium is a word on the page, whereas everything else sort of translates through medium, this one is just my thoughts to yours. Whether it's the purest of the arts, I don't think I'd say it that way. But it's just so direct.

I really respect it. It's also so integral to how I make things. My head has always been in two different worlds. I've always existed with that left side, right side [of the brain]. Most people assume artists gravitate towards art because they don't want the other side or whatever.

I actually had to kill off the analytic, the factual side. I mean, the irony is I remember nothing now what of what I used to do in high school and in junior high. I memorize by rote huge passages. You almost had to suppress that to allow the artistic side to have its free rein. There's a battle going on, actually.

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