This is the final part of the interview which is intriguing for the way it is undulating and transgressing boundaries…..
MAYA LIN: Well, because when you’re so young, what do you have going for you? Total belief in what you’ve done. There was no doubt. I think 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. How were you so sure of that? Because 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.
BILL MOYERS: You’re sure of your ideals. You’re sure of your beliefs.
MAYA LIN: I knew that would help people. And I think back, and there is no way 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 all — 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. 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. If you look at the top, 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. And everyone was shocked at the size of the text. And they argued, you can’t do that. Because a text in public spaces should be large. Well, and again, I equate it to when you read a billboard, yes, you read it en masse. But it’s more of a personal connection if you read a book because you’re just so connected to it. So can you put a book out in the public realm? Can we make it that personal and still be in a very large public space? And I think that intimacy, which is so important, I think, to any of the work that I do — and people don’t think of that as — there’s more of bravado and a largesse. And I always joke that I don’t make monuments. I make anti-monuments.
BILL MOYERS: One of your competitors called it an open urinal.
MAYA LIN: That I didn’t see.
BILL MOYERS: You didn’t see that?
MAYA LIN: No.
BILL MOYERS: Right-wingers called it an Orwellian glop.
MAYA LIN: Glop. I love that one. I think that critic, actually–what I thought was fascinating is, after it was built, the letters I got from, I think the critic of Orwellian glop — because I remember that one — actually wrote a letter to apologize. Obviously, it was very traumatic and upsetting, but personally, I didn’t take it personally. I felt everyone’s entitled to their opinion. And I actually think veterans, 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. The Vietnam Veterans Fund buffered me. I had no idea that there was a problem with my race. And I was so naive that I remember the very first press conference, some reporter said, don’t you think it’s ironic that the memorial’s the Vietnam Memorial and you’re of Asian descent? And I looked at him, and I was like, well, that’s irrelevant. This is America. That’s irrelevant. Because I was brought up in a very rarefied world, where what mattered was what you thought. It’s academia. It’s what you’re thinking. And 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.
BILL MOYERS: Of course, the bigotry and the hatred and the racism did not have the last word. The monument is last word. And people who visit it are visibly moved. I go there many times, and I never go there without being moved myself, and without seeing everyone who’s passing by deeply moved. Why do you think they’re so moved by it?
MAYA LIN: I think because it’s tapping into some very important — I would say ancient — needs. I think fundamentally, when I was designing it, I thought about the nature of death and acknowledging death. And I think in many, many cultures, dying and the acknowledgement of the death is so much a part of the living. It’s a ritual. And there are big rituals around it. I think America is a very young country. And we’re afraid of growing old, because we’re really young. As a country, we’re afraid of dying. So what do we do? We pretend it doesn’t exist. We do not make huge emotional acknowledgements of that type of a pain. We tend to try to forget about it, which is probably the worst thing you can do. So I think the piece, in being kind of primal, it’s tapping into something that is fundamentally very human. It’s extraordinary to watch people touch the names. It’s as if something were passing back and forth between the name and the touch. And there’s something very quiet and very intimate.
BILL MOYERS: I didn’t grasp why it was so powerful to be there until I actually read this sentence from your essay where you say, looking at that black marble, “It would be an interface between our world and the quieter, darker, more peaceful world beyond.”
MAYA LIN: Right. And that’s a world we can’t enter, because we can’t pass through those names. And it’s painful. But again — and I had not known anyone who had died. I just had a feeling that it’s got to be the most painful experience that you will ever go through. But what you have is the memory. And you have to accept it. And then you have to turnaround walk back into the light. But if you don’t accept it, you’ll never get over it.
BILL MOYERS: Maya Lin, thank you very much.
MAYA LIN: Oh, you’re welcome.