Maya Ying Lin

Maya Ying Lin (born 1959) is an American architect. Her parents, who fled from China because of the Communist Revolution of 1949, were quite strong in the academic field; her mother being a professor of literature and poetry and her father, a ceramic artist. Growing up, she was somewhat ignorant of her difference being Chinese-American but she was also closed up from the outside world and strived to be best in academic. As neither of her parents had offered to speak up about their past and the fact that she was brought up in an environment where it's better not to pray into others' business, she didn't know much about her past and got the tendency to stay reserved. This tendency actually got her into a bit of trouble while building the memorial for the Vietnam War. Maya Lin first attracted the attention of the nation at the age of 21 with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Another famous project by her is the Civil Rights Memorial.

Maya Lin's works have always been a personal work for her. For the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, she chose a design that was unconventional at the time for memorial. Her design was to create "a part within a park," in which the two walls would mimic a wound in the earth that's healing and closing. Her belief was to create a memorial that reflects the gravity of the causalities by mimicking a wound in the heart of the Americans at the end of such terrible war. As Lin explained in her entry, by creating a park within a park with so much open space around the memorial, the visitors have to walk through the grassy site from afar where the names on the walls would be barely visible. However, as the visitors approached the memorial, they began to make out the names which seems "infinite in number," and thus they "convey the sense of overwhelming numbers while unifying these individuals a whole" (The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund). The material used for the two walls is polished black granite. In her entry into the competition, she explained that the two joined walls would each led the visitors towards a different monument; Washington Monument to the left and the Lincoln Memorial to the right. As the walls are made of polished black granite, they reflected the two monuments and the landscape, thus bringing the wall into "an historical context" (The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund). The point where the walls meet is the highest point of the whole memorial and then towards different side, the wall each gradually decreased in height. Standing at the intersection, the visitors would be able to read the name of the first casualty of the war on the right side. Following that name, the names of the casualties are written in chronological order. The names continue on until the point where the right wall disappeared into the earth and then start over at the emerging point of the left wall. Finally, the last known casualty of the Vietnam War would be carved at the bottom of the left wall, situated at the intersection of the two walls. Maya Lin described this as "the war's beginning and end meet," saying that the war has come a full-circle (The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund). Even though, the circle is somewhat broken, by the end of each walls, they are still linked by the earth where the dead laid.

In addition, Lin had based her design on another idea to help soothe the nation of the terrible loss of the war. For her, the black granite walls, which gradually ascend from the earth, would act as a barrier to sound, but do not give off the impression of being threatening or being trapped. As the death and the

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