Henry Lin
American, b. Chinese, died 1989
(not assigned)Athens, Ohio, USA
SchoolCeramics
BiographyHenry Lin, Father of May Lin:If you ask Maya Lin what type of artist she is, one of the things she will say is "Midwestern." She was born in Athens, Ohio, twenty miles from West Virginia, on the fringes of the Appalachians.
Athens is the home of Ohio University, where Lin's mother (who still lives there) taught English and Asian literature, and where Lin's father (who died in 1989) was the dean of the college of fine arts. Through sixth grade, Lin went to the university's laboratory school, Putnam-a place where, in the progressive tradition of university laboratory schools, the children were encouraged to pursue their own interests. "By second or third grade, I was doing my own thing," she says. "I still resent being told what to do in any way, shape, or form. I'm sure it's clinical." After Putnam, she went to public school, where she was first in her class.
Athens, she says, was idyllic. Still, she felt out of place. There are two forms of adolescent alienation: the kind where you reject your family and embrace your peers, and the kind where the sentiments run the other way. Lin's was the second type. She never had a close friend after sixth grade; she didn't wear makeup or go to the prom. "I was pretty much isolated by the time I got to high school," she told me one day when we were sitting in the back of her studio, in a space she reserves for her art projects. There was a model behind her for what will eventually be a room-size sculpture based on the contours of the ocean floor (which look a lot like the hills of southeastern Ohio). "I didn't get it. I never listened to, like, the Beatles. I was sort of in my own little world, and didn't realize there was any other world.
"I think some kids are just that way," she said. "I think it was also the way my parents felt in Athens." Lin is descended from two highly accomplished Chinese families. Her paternal grandfather, Lin Changmin, was a scholar, poet, and diplomat whose daughter Lin Huiyin, Maya Lin's aunt, married Liang Sicheng, the son of the prominent political reform leader Liang Qichao. The couple were educated at the University of Pennsylvania, in the nineteen-twenties, and when they returned to China they dedicated themselves to recording and preserving China's architectural heritage. Liang and Lin were also designers of some eminence. Liang was involved in planning the United Nations headquarters, in New York, in 1947. After the Communists took over, he and Lin helped design the new national flag and the Monument to the People's Heroes, in the center of Tiananmen Square. Maya Lin's mother, Ming-Hui, known as Julia, is the daughter of a prominent Shanghai eye specialist who received his medical education at Penn. Both of Julia's grandmothers were doctors; one of them was trained at Johns Hopkins.
Lin's parents left China as the Communists were coming to power. Her father, Huan, called Henry, got out fairly easily. He had been an administrator at Fuzhou Christian University, and left in 1948 for the University of Washington, on a scholarship to study education. Julia, though, had an odyssey. Her father used his American connections to get her admitted, as a junior, to Smith College, but the telegram informing her that she had been offered a scholarship arrived the day the Communists marched into Shanghai, in May of 1949. She met Henry Lin at the University of Washington, where she went for graduate work, in 1951. (Source: LOUIS MENAND,
"THE RELUCTANT MEMORIALIST," The New Yorker Online, (July 8, 2002), Accessed August 10, 2004,
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
- male
There are no works to discover for this record.