Maya Lin, now the most famous female architect in the United States, was viciously attacked when, as a Yale undergraduate in 1980, she won a nationwide contest to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. “How can you let a gook design this?” some veterans asked. “How did it happen that an Asian-American woman was permitted to make a memorial for American men who died fighting in Asia?” (Chang 392)

Footnote 65: Lin later noted her loyalty and patriotism to the United States. “If you ask, I would identify myself as Chinese American,” she wrote in Art in America in 1991. “If I had to choose one thing over the other, I would choose American. I was not born in China, I was not raised there, and the China my parents knew no longer exists … I don’t have an allegiance to any country but this one, it is my home.”