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Keaton Mohr English 250 - McGough 4 Oct. 2013 The Power of Names A name holds many purposes. It is used as an identifier, a way to distinguish the millions of people that live in the world. It is also used as a way to express individuality, by the vast variety of names and spellings. The most lasting purpose, though, of a name is the effect it can have over people. Names are not things that are temporary; they last forever. In Maya Lins Between Art and Architecture essay, she argues how a name (even if it is of a deceased person) has power over others, and it affects anyone from veterans of the war to college students reading it in textbooks today. Maya Lin was an architecture student studying at Yale University when she entered a contest for the best design for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the National Mall. Jan Scruggs, the founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, had put on this contest in 1980 once he had bought three acres in the Mall to build the memorial on. Using the requirements set by Scruggs and his committee, Maya designed a simple memorial, consisting of a single slab of black granite that was sunken in the ground, that won the whole contest. Her design fit all the requirements: it didnt make a political statement, it was contemplative and reflective, it fit in with the rest of the Mall, and it bore all 58,000 names of the missing and deceased soldiers in the Vietnam War. This was where the controversy began. The memorial was completed a year later, but not without major additions to her design. In 1981, Jimmy Carter lost the presidential elections to Ronald Reagan, shifting the Democratic-dominant government to a Republican-dominated government. James Watt, the new Secretary of the Interior, felt the memorial needed to have an American touch to it. He was also answering to the many outcries and complaints of Americans who disliked and criticized Lins design. Maya Lin was very calm about the controversy but chose to forget it at the same time. A big underlying reason for the outcries was because of her racial background; she was a Chinese American, and people were racist against that because the Vietnam War was fought in Asia. During this era, racial issues were still very common, especially about

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other races such as Asians, Mexicans, and so on, and Maya Lin wasnt in a good position when the criticism began. It wasnt until 2000, almost twenty years later, that she spoke out about the controversy of her design. By then, racial issues were starting to become less common and the controversy of her design had died out. It was only then did she feel comfortable speaking out. The context of society and their outlook on her design and her race when she wrote her book was vastly different from when she first made the design. Maya states how she designed the memorial to be simple and focus on the main point of its creation: the soldiers of the war. She wanted it to be just their names so it could hold a power over the visitors of the memorial, to show all the sacrifice those soldiers had made. In the context of 1980, people didnt understand this because they were more worried about her race and how un -American the memorial was. However, in 2000, the context of societys views changed how they thought of the memorial: as a piece bearing hundreds of names that would go down in history. A name bears a powerful sense over others, especially the names of those who have sacrifice for their beliefs, and for the people and country they loved. It wasnt until twenty years after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that people understood the true meaning of Maya Lins design. She meant for it to leave an impression on a person as she says I think it left a lasting impression on me... the sense of the power of a name. Names hold power, dead or alive, and it is how a person acts in life that determines if his or her name will go down in history as a hero, or be lost in the dust of death.

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Works Cited Lin, Maya. Between Art and Architecture. Convergences: Themes, Texts and Images For Composition. Ed. Robert Atwan. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009. 124126. Print.