asian pacific american heritage month

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and as far as I know, there aren't too many events on the calendar to mark the month here in Washington. However, WETA 26 (our local PBS affiliate) celebrates by showing a number of programs about the Asian experience in America this month. Their APA Heritage Month program guide has a full listing, but I wanted to highlight a couple of my favorites on the list: Globe Trekker: New Zealand showing on 12 May at 10:00pm (highlights Maori culture), Globe Trekker: Hawaii showing on Thursday 19 May at 10:00pm, and Becoming American: The Chinese Experience (a Bill Moyers special from 2003) on Sunday 29 May at 11:00am.

I've seen the Bill Moyers special before and I think it's really well done. The part of it that I found a little surprising was how blatant the prejudices were in the 1980s when Maya Lin's design was selected for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall. Opinion pieces and political cartoons in the press expressed outrage that an Asian person's design could be selected for that particular memorial. The cartoons were downright racist in their portrayal of Lin. Veterans asked, "How can you let a gook design this? How did it happen that an Asian-American woman was permitted to make a memorial for American men who died fighting in Asia?" (Iris Chang, The Chinese in America, 2003) Even some politicians joined the chorus, with one of the more prominent examples being Ross Perot calling Lin an "egg roll."

Outside factors aside, I think the design of the memorial is amazing -- minimalist, but so powerful. I'll let the professionals describe what makes it so powerful. First, Robert Campbell, "An Emotive Place Apart," A.I.A. Journal, May 1983:

As you descend the path along the wall and reach this angle, you realize that one wing of the black wall points straight at the tall, white Washington Monument a mile or so off, and the other at the Lincoln Memorial, visible through a screen of trees about 600 feet away. In making this descent you feel you're entering a cloistered space, set off from the busy surroundings. Streets and skylines disappear to leave you alone with the wall and its names. Then, as you pass the angle and begin to climb, you feel yourself emerging again into the world of noise and light after a meditative experience.

Next, Edward Tufte in Envisioning Information, 1990 (I have an autographed copy).

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. achieves its visual and emotional strength by means of micro/macro design. From a distance the entire collection of names of 58,000 dead soldiers arrayed on the black granite yields a visual measure of what 58,000 means, as the letters of each name blurs into a gray shape, cumulating to the final toll. When a viewer approaches, these shapes resolve into individual names. Some of the living seek the name of one particular soldier in a personal micro-reading; more than a few visitors touch the etched, textured names. We focus on the tragic information; absent are the big porticoes, steps and stairs, and other marble paraphernalia usually attached to grand official monuments. Walking on a slight grade downward (approaching from either side), our first close reading is of panels no higher than a few names. But looking forward, the visitor sees names of the dead rising higher and higher, a statistical blur of marks in the distance with micro-detail at hand. The context is enlarged by calm reflections off polished black granite, reflections of the living and of trees, and, at distance, of the Lincoln and Washington memorials toward which the walls angle.

Maya Lin, the designer, in her own words:

It was while I was at the site that I designed it. I just sort of visualized it. It just popped into my head. Some people were playing Frisbee. It was a beautiful park. I didn't want to destroy a living park. You use the landscape. You don't fight with it. You absorb the landscape... When I looked at the site I just knew I wanted something horizontal that took you in, that made you feel safe within the park, yet at the same time reminding you of the dead. So I just imagined opening up the earth...

If you are familiar with landscape/garden design philosophies, you will know that the traditional garden designs of the west (particularly British and French) have a philosophy of shaping the land into a neat man-made order with a meaning while the traditional garden designs of the east (particularly Chinese and Japanese) have a philosophy of letting the natural surroundings provide the meaning while letting man highlight the meaning. Both of these philosophies are evident in Lin's design, which makes sense because Lin expresses, "My voice is very much coming out of a bicultural experience." Which goes to show what I've been saying for a while now, that every designer's (regardless of their field) work is a function of their life experiences, which is why I really value being on teams (especially engineering and design teams) composed of people with diversely varying views of the world. Plus there's my personal goal of enriching my own life experiences, a little at a time, by dabbling in fields I wouldn't otherwise know about, meeting people of all sorts, trying to travel as much as I can, not to mention read insane amounts of random stuff in bookstores, libraries, and the Web.

I want to highlight one more element of the design: the ordering of the names on the wall. The names appear on the wall chronologically, by date of death, not by alphabetical order, that way veterans would find their friends and remember their stories in the panel that corresponded with their tour of duty. Consider the case if the names were listed alphabetically instead: the wall would have the appearance of a phone book and it would remove the sense of uniqueness and memory associated with each name. So as Tufte says, "... the names on stone triple-function: to memorialize each person who died, to make a mark adding up the total, and to indicate sequence and approximate date of death. A directory-book (located at the end of the wall) alphabetically lists all the names and serves as a finder, pointing viewers to the location of a single engraved name."

Truly, Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a masterpiece of information design. Take a moment to think about all of the design elements above and how each one represents some sort of information -- it really is amazing (and this is the stuff that really excites me). Sinking the memorial into the ground instead of building it up out of the ground, choosing polished black granite as the material and color, listing the name of every loss instead of engraving quotations, ordering the names chronologically instead of alphabetically, setting the angles of the walls, etc... Each one of those design decisions convey some piece of information on its own and conveys a theme when put together, so powerful that when you are standing at the memorial, you hear nothing but silence from the people around you (without a "quiet please" sign in sight), you see tears of sadness and loss, your head sinks in contemplation but you can't remove yourself from the loss as beneath you are the things people have left behind, you nod at the veteran who remembers his friend, and you really feel something. The design, combined with what it stands for is powerfully moving. That's why I think it's a design masterpiece.