One of the commentators in this short video about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial mentions that Maya Lin faced some backlash and racism once she was identified as the winner of the design competition. Was this really the case? I lived overseas at the time and do remember reading about criticisms of the design, but I don’t remember racism being an issue.
I certainly remember it.
I do remember it. The design of the memorial was pretty controversial in itself and being designed by an Asian-American art student just added more fuel to the fire.
Yes.
Thanks for the answers, everyone. I suppose that shouldn’t have been that surprising, in hindsight.
“The Black Gash of Shame.”
I have a friend who was in Vietnam, and lost friends and members of his squad. He felt it was an insult having an Asian design the memorial for those who died fighting Asians. And he felt the description of the memorial was ugly. I did not go to Vietnam or loos anyone close to me so I do not have those emotions.
Ironic that she designed has turned out to help the veterans heal. Jim has made the Rolling Thunder ride from California to the memorial on Memorial Day many times.
The main feature of the Memorial, a black wall with names of those who died in the war, is copied by almost every other Vietnam memorial around. But none of those are anywhere near as moving as the original.
Did your friend also know that he was there fighting on behalf of Asians (you know, the South Vietnamese) too? Or did he think it was some kind of genocidal war of extermination? He sounds like an idiot.
The first and primary source of controversy was over the design, mainly for being seen as nihilistic. But that upon closer inquiry you’d learn the designer was an Asian woman was more like the icing on the cake for some people. (Just imagine if there had been blogs and social media at the time).
How is a plaque with the names of the dead “nihilistic”? That’s, like, the definition of a memorial.
But Maya Lin is Chinese, not Vietnamese. Though maybe I shouldn’t look for logic in racism…
I highly recommend Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, a documentary made in 1994. If it’s not on Netflix, etc. you can get a used copy on Amazon for $7. It covers the entire story of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (and the controversy), plus at the end some of her subsequent pieces are showcased.
Plus that won an Oscar for Best Documentary.
The wall was built with an open angle (160° or so?), of black stone, and behind it the land rises up to meet the top of the wall, giving (from some perspectives) the impression that it has been “sunken” into the ground, (which was the origin of the “gash” epithet). This is in contrast to (for example) the Iwo Jima memorial with its rousing action motif. In order to keep funding from being blocked by curmudgeons in Congress, the Park Service agreed to add a set of figures at one end.
(I picked the winter scene for the Vietnam memorial to show its outline more clearly. The summer scene shows the angle better.)
Are you familiar with the memorial at all? It’s not a plaque with the names of the dead. At the time some characterized it as a black hole in the ground, indicating the futility of the US’s involvement in Vietnam. As tomndebb says, although it’s not actually sunken it gives that appearance. It’s drastically different from memorials to the US’s other wars.
In the view of many, including me, the figures enhance the monument - they look like they’re reading the names of buddies who didn’t come back. Go there in person and you’ll feel the power of it. You’ll likely see a number of visitors breaking down and crying, even all these decades later, along with various mementos and gifts left there, or tracing names with their fingers. You may be one of those visitors yourself. You won’t see that sort of thing at many of the other conventional memorials anywhere else.
Yes, The Wall was controversial at the time, since it looked more like a badge of shame than a memorial like anyone else had ever seen. I do remember comments about Lin’s youth and inexperience preventing her from understanding what she needed to do, but not much about her race. Mostly the criticism was of the selection committee for actually picking her design instead of politely thanking and dismissing hers as a student project that failed. Time has shown who was right, of course.
The Korean War Veterans memorial, statues of an Army company on the march in the rain, past ghost outlines of images related to the war, is the one I don’t quite get.
I don’t get it. In what sense is that not exactly what it is? It’s a very large plaque, of course (as it needs to be, in order to contain so many names), and it’s a slightly unusual shape for a plaque, but it’s a flat surface with a bunch of names engraved into it for purpose of honoring those people.
I read and heard a LOT of criticism of the design of the monument, but almost none of it was racist in nature. (If you’ve ever seen Maya Lin interviewed, she’s a totally Midwestern, All-American girl).
Tom Wolfe called her design “A modernist cliche,” which sums up my impression.
Many conservative commentators were outraged by one aspect of the design or other- the lack of any kind of traditional heroic statue(s), the implied criticism of the war, the perception that the V shape was supposed to be a peace sign. But none of the critiques I saw treated Maya Lin herself as a foreign traitor.
I don’t doubt that she could produce some old correspondence that WAS mighty ugly and even racist.
I’ve been there, and was duly impressed. It’s just that to me it seemed like a standard memorial done exceptionally well and at a much larger scale than usual.