MAYA LIN -- THE WOMAN WHO HEALED AMERICA

WASHINGTON, DC — 1979 — And then the healing began.  

The war killed 58,000 Americans and 2 million Southeast Asians.  Thousands of vets took their own lives.  Thousands more struggled with PTSD.  By 1979, the image of the Vietnam vet was of a “psychological basket case.”  A wounded America, one Washington Post op-ed argued that November, needed a memorial.  

Six weeks later, the contest opened.  Rules were explicit.  The memorial should list the name of every fallen American.  But it should seek “common ground.”   No “comment on the rightness, wrongness, or motivation of U.S. policy.”

A few months later, in a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base, judges began reviewing 1,421 entries.  Each had a number, not a name.  Designs were all over the map.  Giant eagles.  Steadfast soldiers.  Quotes about patriotism and sacrifice.  But one entry stood out.  “He must really know what he’s doing to dare to do something so naive,” one judge said.  Still, not all jurors liked #1026.   One found it “sketchy,” another “vague.”  But as they talked, they began to look deeper.  

“Washington is a city of white memorials, rising,” a judge said.  “This is a dark memorial, receding.”  

Early in May 1981, a Marine colonel visited Maya Lin in her dorm at Yale.  The gruff man detailed the massive number of entries, the difficulty of choosing.  Lin thought she had lost, but then the colonel said, “No.”  She won.  Could she come to DC next week?  Well, she didn’t know.  Maybe after graduation?

She grew up in Ohio.  “No no,” everyone said.  “Where are you really from?”  Her parents fled Mao’s China to settle in the town of Athens where each taught at the state university.  “I’ve been an artist probably from the first time I stepped into my dad’s ceramics studio,” Lin said.

Excelling in science and math, Lin went to Yale and discovered architecture, “this perfect combination of science math, and art.”  In her senior year, she took a new class, “funerary art,” taught by a professor just back from studying war memorials in Europe.  Lin hated designing memorials for some future war.  No one would survive World War III, so what was the point?  But then the professor challenged students to enter the new national contest.  During Thanksgiving break, Lin went to DC and walked the proposed site.

“It was a beautiful park,” she remembered. “ I didn’t want to destroy a living park.  You use the landscape, you don’t fight with it.”  Back at Yale, she envisioned “a rift in the earth.”  “I imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, and with the passage of time, that initial violence and pain would heal.” 

She fashioned a model out of mashed potatoes.  Later she added fallen slabs, like dominoes, with the 58,000 names.  Her professor told her to get rid of the slabs.  Lin agreed.  She got an A on the project.

A week after graduation, she moved to DC.  There, the wounded nation continued to writhe.  Sketches of the planned memorial outraged veterans.  “Inane.”  “Monstrous.”  “An erosion control project.”  “If the current model has to be built,” the National Review wrote, “stick it off in some tidal flat, and let it memorialize Jane Fonda’s contribution to ensuring that our soldiers died in vain.”

The controversy raged for months.  Congress held hearings.  Vet groups kept up their barrage.  Lin was called “egg roll” and “a gook.”  Interior Secretary James Watt refused to issue a building permit.  Maya Lin soldiered on.  

“Beginning to vanquish the devils,” she wrote in her journal.  “The eyes and whispers — ‘she’s the one. . .’  The little girl, the child.”  She defended her design on TV, at hearings, before critics.  Finally a compromise added the “Three Soldiers” statue nearby. 

Few were satisfied, but construction began in the spring of 1982.  The memorial ran over budget, as expected, but no one was prepared for what happened when “The Wall” opened that November.

Speeches.  A parade.  A brass band.  And then the veterans came.  And saw their own faces in the reflecting granite.  And saw the names of buddies on the wall.  And reached out to touch.  And wept.  Soon the base of “The Wall” was littered with mementos — flowers and medals and dog tags.  And more people came.  And more. . . 

Three million people visit The Wall each year.  Few ever forget it.  Maya Lin has gone on to design other memorials.  A granite circle in Montgomery, Alabama, with the names of 41 victims of the Civil Rights Movement.  A “Women’s Table” commemorating women’s contributions to Yale.  And other designs found from Southern California to Sweden to New Zealand. 

Today, she runs the Maya Lin Design Studio in Manhattan.  But it was her vision, as a 21-year-old college senior, that helped a nation heal.  

“As you read a name, and touch a name, the pain will come out.  I really did mean for people to cry.”  Then, “turn around and walk back up into the light of the present.”