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She pauses, seems lost in thought, then begins again, determined to make her point. "I just don't think we give enough credit to our public. The Viet Nam memorial was first seen as some sort of elitist statement. It's like you see it before you really see it. But if you don't have preconceived notions, the presence of the object will touch you in some way, and you'll be in dialogue with it. I mean, what do you do with people like Tom Wolfe? His fear of modern art is sad. He must have been flogged with a Brancusi somewhere along the way."
Lin concedes that her artistic vision is "distinctly Asian" in its stark simplicity and virtual requirement to "look inward." If it, and her almost single-minded devotion to work, can be traced to anything, it is to the close- knit, ascetic world of her family. Her parents fled China just before the Communist takeover in 1949 and eventually settled in Athens, Ohio, where her father, a ceramicist, taught for many years at Ohio University, and where her mother, a poet, still does. Her older brother, Tan, is also a poet. Lin's family in China, which included an architect and a famous lawyer who worked for progressive causes, has been described in Jonathan Spence's The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980.
Since she didn't date, didn't wear makeup (still doesn't) and took college classes while still in high school, she didn't have a typical American adolescence, but says she didn't care. From childhood on, she could go "for hours and days just playing by myself or reading," and recalls with pleasure how she would build little towns in her room or beg her father to let her throw a pot, or have spirited games of chess with Tan. "I find it very fun to be thinking all the time, figuring things out. I guess you could say I was somewhat of a nerd," she laughs.
It wasn't until she arrived at Yale that she felt she belonged and that her creativity and diligence were fully appreciated. But something happened during her junior year in Denmark to mar that feeling of assimilation. She got on a bus in Copenhagen one day and became acutely aware that people moved away from her. It was the first time in her life that she felt discriminated against.
In ways that he couldn't have fully imagined, Edward Ashworth found the $ right person to design the Civil Rights memorial.