![]() ![]() “I’m fairly clueless,” Lin told me “I’m also really stubborn.” The veterans decided that the best move would be to get her off the stage as fast as possible and let the grownups take over. And they connected me with antiwar and sixties radicals.” She was also, of course, a woman, and her parents were Asian. I’m wearing Frye boots because I’m a fashion disaster. I’m not cutting my hair because I’m a good Chinese daughter. “I grew up in a college town in the middle of Appalachia,” she explained, “so I’m still wearing Frye boots, and wearing my hair really long, and everyone’s thinking I’m some sixties hippie. She was a myopic grind so indifferent to the rest of the world that she often didn’t bother to wear her glasses in class. In 1981, Lin wore her hair down to her knees. Lin learned during graduation week that her design had been chosen. She mailed the application just before the deadline, March 31, 1981. Her submission was a pastel drawing, with an essay explaining how people would respond to the work. When Lin returned to Yale, she modeled the piece in the dining hall, out of mashed potatoes. It may be that the Frisbee players reminded her of the Copenhagen cemetery she had studied, for her memorial is, essentially, a gravestone in a park. Constitution Gardens was empty that day except for a few Frisbee players, and she says that the solution simply popped into her head: she would cut into the earth and, in effect, polish it. The students agreed to meet in Washington during the Thanksgiving break to look at the site. In the fall of 1980, the class learned about the competition for the Vietnam Memorial and decided to make it an assignment. Wherever she traveled after that, she told me, “I would always visit the cemetery.” In the summer, people use the grounds as a park, and Lin got interested in the way the space had been integrated into the life of the city. Hans Christian Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard, and other famous Danes are buried there. (She has said that it was in Denmark that she first experienced racial prejudice: people thought she was an Eskimo.) She ended up studying in an area in the northwest corner of Copenhagen, called Nerrebro, which includes an enormous cemetery, Assistens Kirkegard. Lin had become interested in funereal architecture during a trip to Denmark, during her junior year. Lin’s design was an assignment for an undergraduate class on funereal architecture, taught by F. ![]() What did seem to come out of the blue was the person behind Entry #1026 in the design competition, Maya Lin herself. (More names have been added since.) Lin’s design was the unanimous choice of the competition jurors in part because it seemed so uncannily to fit the criteria the planners had in mind. The competition guidelines stipulated that the monument “make no political statement regarding war and its conduct,” and that it include the names of all 57,661 Americans who died in the war. They envisioned a mostly horizontal, contemplative work that did not disrupt the landscape of Constitution Gardens, the area in the Mall designated as the site. The people who planned the memorial-the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and the arts professionals it hired to run the design competition-had specified in advance many of the features for which Lin’s work is admired. There was a need to honor the soldiers who had gone to Vietnam and there was a flourishing contemporary art movement, known as land art, that supplied the formal language for the piece that Lin designed. For a miracle, there is no explanation, and, except for one element, the Vietnam Memorial is explicable. Still, beating the odds is not the same as a miracle. When art and politics collide, it is usually the art that gets totaled that time, against all the odds, it didn’t. “I think it is actually a miracle that the piece ever got built,” Lin wrote about the memorial in Boundaries. She hates Washington, and has rarely been back since her work was finished. “It was beyond miserable.” There is still indignation in her voice when she gets on the subject of the building of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. “It was miserable,” Lin said when I first asked her about her year in Washington. ![]()
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