American Studies (29 page)
Authors: Louis Menand
O
ne afternoon this winter, Maya Lin walked with me from SoHo, where she has her studio, across Canal Street and down Church Street to the place where the World Trade Center once stood.
1
Lin is a friendly, unpretentious woman. She is slight—she stands a little under five-three and weighs just over a hundred pounds—and though she is forty-two, she could pass for twenty. She dresses, on most days, like a college student who woke up late for class—corduroys, a turtleneck, and a hairband. She takes unexpectedly long strides, however. It’s hard to keep up with her.
ne afternoon this winter, Maya Lin walked with me from SoHo, where she has her studio, across Canal Street and down Church Street to the place where the World Trade Center once stood.
1
Lin is a friendly, unpretentious woman. She is slight—she stands a little under five-three and weighs just over a hundred pounds—and though she is forty-two, she could pass for twenty. She dresses, on most days, like a college student who woke up late for class—corduroys, a turtleneck, and a hairband. She takes unexpectedly long strides, however. It’s hard to keep up with her.
Lin did not especially want to visit the World Trade Center site with me. Within forty-eight hours of the September 11 attacks, calls and faxes had started coming in to her studio. Would Lin comment on the destruction of the World Trade Center? Would she write an op-ed piece about it? Would she be quoted in a magazine story on the New York City skyline? Would she provide remarks for an article
about rebuilding downtown, prepare a sketch of a memorial for
The Early Show
with Bryant Gumbel, join a panel on the meaning of memorialization, submit to an interview with Barbara Walters? It is not her favorite kind of attention.
about rebuilding downtown, prepare a sketch of a memorial for
The Early Show
with Bryant Gumbel, join a panel on the meaning of memorialization, submit to an interview with Barbara Walters? It is not her favorite kind of attention.
“I have fought very, very hard to get past being known as the Monument Maker,” she told me shortly before we decided to take our walk. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated twenty years ago, is the work with which Lin’s name will be forever associated. In a career that, since then, has included houses, apartments, gardens, sculpture, landscape architecture, public art, a library, a museum, a line of furniture, a skating rink, clothing, two chapels, and a bakery, she has designed two other well-received memorials: the Civil Rights Memorial, in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1989, and the Women’s Table, commemorating the admission of female students to Yale, in 1993. But two years ago, in
Boundarie
s, a book in which she reviewed her major works, she announced that she was retiring from the monument business.
2
She had only one more memorial she wanted to make, she said: a work about the extinction of plant and animal species. Then came September 11, and although she declined the requests for articles, sketches, and interviews, she couldn’t get the problem of a memorial out of her head. “Extinction is the last of my memorials,” she told me. “But I cannot stop thinking about the World Trade Center. I just can’t.”
Boundarie
s, a book in which she reviewed her major works, she announced that she was retiring from the monument business.
2
She had only one more memorial she wanted to make, she said: a work about the extinction of plant and animal species. Then came September 11, and although she declined the requests for articles, sketches, and interviews, she couldn’t get the problem of a memorial out of her head. “Extinction is the last of my memorials,” she told me. “But I cannot stop thinking about the World Trade Center. I just can’t.”
On September 11, Lin was in Colorado, where she and her husband, Daniel Wolf, spend the summers with their two young daughters. She woke up a little before the second tower was hit, and she called her brother, Tan, who lives on the Bowery, to see if he was all right. Tan had been watching the towers burn from the roof of his building. Lin and her husband returned to New York that weekend, and went to dinner at a restaurant in Tribeca, as many people were doing to help support businesses downtown. At some point, she noticed that her hand, which she had rubbed inadvertently against a wall, was smeared with ash. It was a while before she could bring herself to wash it off.
Lin thought about trying to get access to Ground Zero in those first few weeks, when people with connections were being issued
hardhats and let into the site, but she decided not to. “I didn’t want to be a tourist,” she told me. She saw the ruins for the first time later in the fall, when they were still smoldering, from an office in the building at One Liberty Plaza. She could see the palm trees in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, all dead from the smoke. When the public viewing platforms went up, though, her instinct was to avoid the place. It’s not that she deprecated people’s desire to see the site. You can hardly be a builder of successful memorials and have no sympathy for the need to gaze on places of sadness and destruction. There is nothing at most Civil War battlefields today except grass, trees, and the occasional plaque; they are visually indistinguishable from a dozen nearby spaces that just happen not to be Civil War battlefields. But every year thousands of people travel miles to stand in them and brood. What distressed Lin about the Trade Center site was the prefabricated quality of the experience—the tickets people had to get, the lines they stood in, the memorabilia being hawked on the sidewalks. Spontaneity is important to her—emotions that mean something should somehow surprise you—and she felt that the lines and the souvenirs regimented people’s response.
hardhats and let into the site, but she decided not to. “I didn’t want to be a tourist,” she told me. She saw the ruins for the first time later in the fall, when they were still smoldering, from an office in the building at One Liberty Plaza. She could see the palm trees in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, all dead from the smoke. When the public viewing platforms went up, though, her instinct was to avoid the place. It’s not that she deprecated people’s desire to see the site. You can hardly be a builder of successful memorials and have no sympathy for the need to gaze on places of sadness and destruction. There is nothing at most Civil War battlefields today except grass, trees, and the occasional plaque; they are visually indistinguishable from a dozen nearby spaces that just happen not to be Civil War battlefields. But every year thousands of people travel miles to stand in them and brood. What distressed Lin about the Trade Center site was the prefabricated quality of the experience—the tickets people had to get, the lines they stood in, the memorabilia being hawked on the sidewalks. Spontaneity is important to her—emotions that mean something should somehow surprise you—and she felt that the lines and the souvenirs regimented people’s response.
There was a five-minute wait when we arrived at the platform. It was chilly, the sidewalks were congested, and it was obvious that Lin had no inclination to stand in line. The other side of her general pleasantness is that you quickly know when she is not so pleased. She doesn’t say much; she just, very politely, shuts off. We turned around, and ten minutes later we were sitting in a café on Broome Street. Lin ordered a cup of tea, and started talking. Something about being near the Trade Center site seemed to lift an inhibition, because a few days later she called to say that she couldn’t believe she had talked so much. What she meant was that she couldn’t believe she had talked so much about the two subjects that she had made up her mind to discuss as little as possible: the World Trade Center and the Vietnam Memorial.
September 11 turned a page in every New Yorker’s life. It is a permanent before-and-after moment. For Lin, it also happened to coincide with a transitional period in her career. A number of large-scale
projects were finishing up, and she felt that she had finally succeeded in defining herself as something more than the designer of the Vietnam Memorial. That was the reason she had written
Boundaries.
But she wasn’t quite ready to begin the next phase.
projects were finishing up, and she felt that she had finally succeeded in defining herself as something more than the designer of the Vietnam Memorial. That was the reason she had written
Boundaries.
But she wasn’t quite ready to begin the next phase.
Lin’s work is self-consciously beautiful, because she is obsessed with harmony—how we fit into the world and how the world shapes us. “Site-specificity” is a cliché in contemporary art and architecture, but, if it is an instinctive mode for any artist, it is for Lin. Her impulse is not to impose form; it is to evoke form out of what is given—the landscape, the building, the light, the natural materials at hand. This impulse expresses itself in work that is simple, graceful, and, in its detachment, a little Zen.
But Lin is not a Zen-like person. She is a worrier. She worries that people think she’s abrasive, and she worries that she comes across as someone who doesn’t know what she’s doing. She thinks that she is too self-absorbed (“People would be amazed at how part of me has lived like the ostrich, with its head in the sand,” she said to me once, when I asked about her life outside work), but distractions make her nervous. The polished, stripped-down, carefully situated work that she creates is the product of a permanently anxious sensibility. If you saw that a smear on your hand was ash, you would probably take note of it, but you would not be spooked by it. Lin was spooked by it, because the other side of her aesthetic is an apprehension of disaster. Her work is about order, harmony, and serenity, but it is also about what order and harmony are created to defy—waste, damage, loss, solitude, death. Her inability to speak of her work in those terms is probably a condition of her compulsion to make it.
If you ask Maya Lin what type of artist she is, one of the things she will say is “Midwestern.” She was born in Athens, Ohio, twenty miles from West Virginia, on the fringes of the Appalachians. Although her architecture shows Scandinavian and Asian influences (she studied in Denmark and Japan), almost all the rest of her
work—the memorials, the sculpture, the landscape art, the installations—takes its inspiration from the hills, stones, and streams of southeastern Ohio.
work—the memorials, the sculpture, the landscape art, the installations—takes its inspiration from the hills, stones, and streams of southeastern Ohio.
Athens is the home of Ohio University, where Lin’s mother (who still lives there) taught English and Asian literature, and where Lin’s father (who died in 1989) was the dean of the college of fine arts. Through sixth grade, Lin went to the university’s laboratory school, Putnam—a place where, in the progressive tradition of university laboratory schools, the children were encouraged to pursue their own interests. “By second or third grade, I was doing my own thing,” she says. “I still resent being told what to do in any way, shape, or form. I’m sure it’s clinical.” After Putnam, she went to public school, where she was first in her class.
Athens, she says, was idyllic. Still, she felt out of place. There are two forms of adolescent alienation: the kind where you reject your family and embrace your peers, and the kind where the sentiments run the other way. Lin’s was the second type. She never had a close friend after sixth grade; she didn’t wear makeup or go to the prom. “I was pretty much isolated by the time I got to high school,” she told me one day when we were sitting in the back of her studio, in a space she reserves for her art projects. There was a model behind her for what will eventually be a room-sized sculpture based on the contours of the ocean floor (which look a lot like the hills of southeastern Ohio). “I didn’t get it. I never listened to, like, the Beatles. I was sort of in my own little world, and didn’t realize there was any other world.
“I think some kids are just that way,” she said. “I think it was also the way my parents felt in Athens.” Lin is descended from two highly accomplished Chinese families.
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Her paternal grandfather, Lin Changmin, was a scholar, poet, and diplomat whose daughter Lin Huiyin, Maya Lin’s aunt, married Liang Sicheng, the son of the prominent political reform leader Liang Qichao. The couple were educated at the University of Pennsylvania, in the 1920s, and when they returned to China they dedicated themselves to recording and preserving China’s architectural heritage. Liang and Lin were also designers of some eminence. Liang was involved in planning the
United Nations headquarters, in New York, in 1947. After the Communists took over, he and Lin helped to design the new national flag and the Monument to the People’s Heroes, in the center of Tiananmen Square.
4
Maya Lin’s mother, Ming-Hui, known as Julia, is the daughter of a prominent Shanghai eye specialist who received his medical education at Penn. Both of Julia’s grandmothers were doctors; one of them was trained at Johns Hopkins.
3
Her paternal grandfather, Lin Changmin, was a scholar, poet, and diplomat whose daughter Lin Huiyin, Maya Lin’s aunt, married Liang Sicheng, the son of the prominent political reform leader Liang Qichao. The couple were educated at the University of Pennsylvania, in the 1920s, and when they returned to China they dedicated themselves to recording and preserving China’s architectural heritage. Liang and Lin were also designers of some eminence. Liang was involved in planning the
United Nations headquarters, in New York, in 1947. After the Communists took over, he and Lin helped to design the new national flag and the Monument to the People’s Heroes, in the center of Tiananmen Square.
4
Maya Lin’s mother, Ming-Hui, known as Julia, is the daughter of a prominent Shanghai eye specialist who received his medical education at Penn. Both of Julia’s grandmothers were doctors; one of them was trained at Johns Hopkins.
Lin’s parents left China as the Communists were coming to power. Her father, Huan, called Henry, got out fairly easily. He had been an administrator at Fuzhou Christian University, and he left in 1948 for the University of Washington, on a scholarship to study education. Julia, though, had an odyssey. Her father used his American connections to get her admitted, as a junior, to Smith College, but the telegram informing her that she had been offered a scholarship arrived the day the Communists marched into Shanghai, in May of 1949. She was smuggled out of Shanghai on a junk used to transport dried fish; her passport, visa, letter of acceptance, and ten dollars were sewn into the collar of her dress and her slippers. It took her a month to get to Hong Kong; she didn’t make it to Smith until October. She met Henry Lin at the University of Washington, where she went for graduate work, in 1951. Her father lost his practice in the Cultural Revolution, and he died in 1975. She never saw him again.
When Maya Lin was growing up, her parents rarely talked about China. Neither she nor her brother speaks Chinese, and she thinks it’s funny that she holds her chopsticks incorrectly (though she does favor Chinese food). She didn’t know the story of her mother’s escape until Julia took her and Tan to Shanghai, in 1985. She didn’t know that her relatives had designed the Monument to the People’s Heroes—that there is, so to speak, monument-making in her genes—until I mentioned it to her last winter. She did not have a sense of dispossession instilled in her. It was subtler than that; she was brought up by people who had been dispossesed, and who were determined that she and her brother should never know the experience.
She did understand that they were cut off from the rest of the
family, and she appreciates the damage to her parents’ lives more clearly now. “The home they knew was completely modified and changed by history,” she said to me. “There wasn’t a place of nostalgia to go back to. I saw it in my father’s face after Tiananmen Square.” (The pro-democracy demonstrations there were suppressed in the spring of 1989.) “He knew that China wouldn’t even begin to return to an open-door policy in his lifetime. It was extremely upsetting. I still can go home, to the house I grew up in, and I know where some of my toys still are, and my dresses. And to wipe it out, to leave home at the age of eighteen or twenty …”
family, and she appreciates the damage to her parents’ lives more clearly now. “The home they knew was completely modified and changed by history,” she said to me. “There wasn’t a place of nostalgia to go back to. I saw it in my father’s face after Tiananmen Square.” (The pro-democracy demonstrations there were suppressed in the spring of 1989.) “He knew that China wouldn’t even begin to return to an open-door policy in his lifetime. It was extremely upsetting. I still can go home, to the house I grew up in, and I know where some of my toys still are, and my dresses. And to wipe it out, to leave home at the age of eighteen or twenty …”
After high school, Lin went to Yale. She loved it. “I didn’t have an adjustment problem,” she told me when I asked her what it was like to go from Athens to the gritty city of New Haven in 1977. “In a strange way, I found kids that were just like me, and for the first time I felt that I fit in.” She started out in the sciences, with the thought that she would become a field zoologist. When she learned that Yale’s program involved vivisection, she quickly abandoned that idea. She didn’t know, at first, what to do instead; but she loved art and she loved math—so, she explained, architecture seemed perfect.
Lin didn’t take any architecture courses in her first two years at Yale, but when she finally began the program, she said, “I just focused, and I did nothing but. I would schedule my classes so they met once a week, and then I would pull all-nighters, like every other unhealthy little architecture student.” One semester, she never went to the library. She simply obsessed about her buildings, and that has been her practice ever since.
After her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was chosen, in 1981, she spent a year in Washington overseeing its development, taught at Exeter for a summer, and then entered the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She dropped out after less than a semester, because it was too difficult to deal with the issues surrounding the construction of the memorial and do her schoolwork at the same time. The next fall, she went back to Yale. She took her degree from the School of Architecture in 1986, and received an honorary doctorate from Yale in 1987. She has remained devoted to the university.
Last December, Yale’s president, Richard Levin, asked Lin if she would be willing to stand for election as an alumni fellow of the Yale Corporation. Another Yale graduate, a New Haven pastor named the Reverend W. David Lee, had already put himself forward as a candidate representing the interests of the unions, from which he had accepted donations, and the community. Lin declined to campaign personally against Lee. She believes that it’s inappropriate to have an agenda when you serve on a board, but she was not happy to find herself cast as the alternative to reform. (Alumni and former Yale administrators did campaign against Lee, though, and Lin ended up defeating him handily, in an election in which three times the usual number of alumni voted.)
Last December, Yale’s president, Richard Levin, asked Lin if she would be willing to stand for election as an alumni fellow of the Yale Corporation. Another Yale graduate, a New Haven pastor named the Reverend W. David Lee, had already put himself forward as a candidate representing the interests of the unions, from which he had accepted donations, and the community. Lin declined to campaign personally against Lee. She believes that it’s inappropriate to have an agenda when you serve on a board, but she was not happy to find herself cast as the alternative to reform. (Alumni and former Yale administrators did campaign against Lee, though, and Lin ended up defeating him handily, in an election in which three times the usual number of alumni voted.)
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