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Public Affairs Television "Becoming American" Interview with Maya Lin

BILL MOYERS: If someone asked me now what is Taoism, I would say it's Maya Lin. (LAUGH) You're the embodiment of this duality.

MAYA LIN: And I've never read anything.

BILL MOYERS: (LAUGH) And you've never read it.

MAYA LIN: It's sort of ironic.

BILL MOYERS: -- this harmony of the opposites.

MAYA LIN: Yeah. The yin-yang.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Alrighty. (LAUGH) I brought this from BOUNDARIES. Would-- you read this because it is wonderful writing. Tell me about where this is from?

MAYA LIN: This is describing the design of the Vietnam Memorial.

BILL MOYERS: And you wrote this as part of your proposal?

MAYA LIN: "I had a simple impulse to cut into the earth" is a descriptive essay that I wrote about it.

BILL MOYERS: Read it.

MAYA LIN: I had a simple impulse to cut into the earth. I imagine taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up and the initial violence and pain that in time would heal. The grass would grow back, but the initial cut would remain a pure, flat surface in the earth with a polished mirrored surfaced, much like the surface on a geode when you cut it and polish the edge.

The need for the names to be on the memorial would become the memorial. There was no need to embellish the design further. The people and their names would allow everyone to respond and remember. It would be an interface between our world and the quieter, darker, more peaceful world beyond.

BILL MOYERS: Now let me ask you about that. Where did that impulse to cut into the earth come from?

MAYA LIN: My process is that I'll study something. And what I was studying for the three months leading up to the design of the memorial was this funereal class. We asked a professor to be our professor. As a senior at Yale, you could make your own senior seminar. So there were I think 11 of us that wanted to study funereal architecture, or the architecture in relation to mortality.

So we had been studying and designing things. One of the problems was design a memorial to World War III, one was design a cemetery cherub or something. And so I had been thinking, when I was designing a memorial to World War III, what is the nature of a memorial? And I studied World War I memorials. I went back to Trajan's Column.

So again, research. Studied something for a couple months. Put it all away. Went to visit the site. No thinking, just had an impulse. It's the egg.

MAYA LIN: Just cut open the earth, open it up. This is where I think a critic is better at it than me because I think when we try to find hindsight reason-- but obviously I was responding to what it was about and that's how it came out.

I had huge debates with the architect of record that was selected to work with me to realize it because he could not understand why I didn't want to create massive stone walls. I in the end wanted this stone surface to get so thin it was paper thin. Now, from an architect's point of view, that's a veneer; that's cheap. This is a memorial. We should make this massive and big.

But think about the difference: if you put something with weight, then you've actually inserted an object. You've dropped a physical thing into the earth. All I wanted to do was cut the earth and polish the earth's edge. I didn't want weight. Now I didn't know that at the time. In a way, I couldn't explain it. But I just kept going, "Thinner. Thinner." Literally, if you go up on top, you'll see it was actually a very tricky detail because you wanted the grass to literally grow right up to the stone. So the top of the memorial is only two inches thick. Then it chamfers down and drops.

Now I'm not saying, "I want it to look like a geode." This is a year later writing. I love rocks, I love geology, I love the earth. But then I just knew I needed this thing to be thin.

BILL MOYERS: You didn't think metaphorically about how the Vietnam War had cut a great gash in the psyche of this country?

MAYA LIN: No. I'm so naive that way. I was like, "Oh, yeah, it's like cutting open the earth and opening it up." And everyone said, "Scar?" And the minute you say scar in the media, it's like, "We don't want a scar." Well, I agree, no one would want that; I didn't say a scar. (LAUGH) I just said it's a process piece.

They read into it. The other thing they read into is that it's a V for victory. And I kept going, "Well, if you tried to do that as big as the memorial, you'd break your fingers. It's really not that." And the third way they read into the image was the color black as being, again, a very negative statement. And then it took Colonel Price, who happens to be African American, getting up in front of one of the subcommittee hearings and saying, "I see nothing wrong with the color black."

And then that quelled it politically but it didn't quell it in the fracas that was happening outside of the subcommittee. You had to get through the process. To get the memorial built, you had to go through five committees two or three times. Normally what happens in Washington is the architecture gets chewed up in the committees.

This time around, it was amazing. Everyone within the committees was very, very protective of the piece and of me. And what happened outside was this thing turned into this huge political thing.

BILL MOYERS: Well, it was not only political, Maya Lin, it was personal. I mean, the most vicious and venomous things were said about you. You were called a gook, someone said you were making a tribute to Jane Fonda.

Congressman Henry Hyde intervened with the White House to try to get the president to stop the project. There were personal attacks on you. How did you cope with those? You were so young.

MAYA LIN: Because when you're so young, what do you have going for you? Total belief in what you've done. There was no doubt. As you get older, we all begin to have doubts. I think when you're 20 years old, you're right. And I knew I was right and once it was up, they would get it.

BILL MOYERS: Well, how were you so sure of that?

MAYA LIN: I just knew. If we all think back to when we're that young, that's one of the things we really have going for us. You're sure of your ideals. You're sure of your beliefs.

If I won that competition today, I don't think I could have weathered the storm. Back then, there was nothing to weather. I totally understood that people would think it was. If I was a Vietnam veteran and someone said, "You're getting a ditch, a black ditch,"-- I think the quote was a black ditch of shame and sorrow. If that's what I read, I wouldn't want it either. I could understand. I could understand people not getting what it would be.
What fascinates me is how I was never afraid that it wouldn't work. Whereas I think now, absolutely, you'd be terrified. You'd be thinking, "Oh my God, what if they're right and I'm wrong?" You don't have that when you're that age.
I am very focused. And some would say extremely stubborn. And you kinda know when you've hit it, you know when it's right.

BILL MOYERS: One of your competitors called it an open urinal--

MAYA LIN: (LAUGH) That I didn't see.

BILL MOYERS: You didn't see that? A right winger called it "an Orwellian glop".

MAYA LIN: Glop. (LAUGH)

BILL MOYERS: You read that. (LAUGH)

MAYA LIN: After it was built, I got a letter from the critic of "Orwellian glop" who actually wrote a letter to apologize. He was the architectural writer for the CHICAGO TRIBUNE. And he actually wrote and said, "I'm really sorry. I made a mistake."

I mean the only ones who I really thought less of in the whole thing was probably [Secretary of the Interior] Lott and [Ross] Perot and their methodology and how they thought they could buy in--

He tried to stop it on the direction of Gee Whiz Reagan when he was visiting in Texas would stay at his friend's ranch. And even Perot truly believed that what I was doing would denigrate the veterans.

I mean, he was wrong. And I remember meeting him and I wanted to tell him he was wrong. But you're allowed to have your opinion.

Actually, ironically the only person I sort of really felt kind of very much less of was the sculptor of the three statues. Because as an artist, you should know to respect another person's art. And I remember the whole controversy was he wanted the statues right there at the apex. And I remember a meeting when he literally turned to me and said, with his statues there, and at that point they would have been taller, their heads would have been poking up above. He said, "My sculpture will improve your work."

I would never in a million years disrespect another artist that way. So that was the only one that was a little strange. Obviously it was very traumatic and upsetting, but I didn't take it personally. I felt that everyone's entitled to their opinion. I actually think Vietnam veterans reading in the paper that this is an Asian memorial for an Asian war, it wasn't even about racism. It was like this is hard for them to swallow.

I mean, the Vietnam Veterans Fund buffered me. I had no idea that there was a problem with my race. I was so naive that I remember at the very first press conference some reporter said, "Don't you think it's ironic that the memorial is the Vietnam Memorial and you're of Asian descent?" And I looked at him, and I was like, "Well, that's irrelevant. You know, this is American. That's irrelevant."

I was brought up in a very rarified world where what mattered was what you thought. It's academia; it's what you're thinking. Your gender didn't matter, your age didn't matter, your race didn't matter. So I actually was so happily naive I didn't realize that people would have a problem with me.

BILL MOYERS: Has the irony occurred to you that your parents had spent so much of their lives trying to protect you, keep you in a little bubble of immunity from all of this, and suddenly it's all over you?

MAYA LIN: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: How did they take it?

MAYA LIN: I'm sure they were quite worried. They were in Ohio, but I wouldn't tell 'em what was going on. I just would not tell them because the one thing we couldn't do to our parents is have them worry. The worst thing my brother or I could ever do is do something that would make our parents worry.

So I didn't tell them anything. I didn't talk to anyone about what was going on. I just absorbed it. I didn't even realize how bad it was because I just did it. This is not pleasant. I don't like Washington. I will get out of here as soon as I can. I dealt with it by absolutely refusing to talk about it.

BILL MOYERS: I believe you when you say you weathered it. But you just acknowledged to me what I had to believe of you: I don't see how you could have gone through this without it hurting.

MAYA LIN: Well, I think it was hurting. But again, I would be not acknowledging it by not talking about it. And I would give the excuse of: "I'll only talk about the conceptual basis of the art because the controversy is just silly. You know, it's not important."

But obviously what was happening is I was just bottling it all up. And I think it was after the documentary came out-- because Freida Mock who did the documentary, she was very sensitive. And she knew I'd bolt and run. I never realized how much the film would deal with the controversy and the memorial.

Even though I respect her; it's her art, you know, she's gonna do it, I'm gonna see it when it's all done, if I had had my druthers at that point, I would have stopped it. 'Cause again, I couldn't handle it. And it was literally not until after I saw it, I was a basket case. I was balling. I had to deal with it. Because my way of dealing with it was to tell no one, talk to no one, go through graduate architecture school, pull the all-nighters, work like a crazy person.

I mean, architecture graduate school is one big [charade], night after night. So my way of getting over it was to throw myself right back into first Harvard then Yale.

And it's so sweet because the then head of Harvard's GSD program-- I withdrew after a semester because I was spending my time shuttling down to Washington to testify, and I would never talk about it-- came up to me years later and said—('cause he had seen the film), "I am so sorry. We had no idea what you were going through." And I didn't know what I was going through.

But I got back to Yale graduate school. They liked me when I was an undergrad. And I remember one of my favorite advisors when I was an undergrad was so looking forward to having me like possibly T.A. his course, which would have been a great honor and all this.

And I get to my first year in graduate school and I'm a basket case. I mean, I'm doing the work, but I'm never finishing anything. What they didn't realize is it was like I just had to get out of Washington. I had to go back to academia, my only safe haven. And they thought, "You have the perfect opportunity to launch your career. You're worse-- "

And I think we all know what it was. I mean, at this point now, It took me a few years to kind of recover from it.

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