WASHINGTON, DC — I knew I didn’t want to see the wannabe-Beaux Arts buildings of Capitol Hill, the erect dick of the Washington Monument, the cliché of looking out glumly at the reflecting pool. I didn’t even want to hide from the absurd heat — 80 degrees in November — in the cloister of one of DC’s museums. I wanted something that felt like it would match the moment. I wanted an anti-monument.
From afar, a trick of the light makes the Vietnam Veterans Memorial designed by Maya Lin look like a small body of water, an oasis in a desert of grass. Then vertical lines split that darkness, and it flattens into slabs of grayish stone. And then you realize that that gray is not surface but heart: chiseled names gouged out from black granite, the names of so many dead.
It starts off barely there — the stanchions that keep you off the grass tower over it. But keep walking, and the names start — just one line etched upon a foot (~30 cm) of stone. Then three. Then six. Soon it feels like you’re sliding down the smooth stone of the walkway and the monument is opening up all around you, as if your very movement is slicing through the fascia of the earth to create this dark gash, this wound. It’s not long before it, instead, towers over you.
“I found my name!” a little kid called out, delighted, to his parents, as if he were looking at a rack of keychains at a souvenir shop. Certain names caught my eye, too. Akira Yamashita, for one. Born in San Francisco; buried in Moroyama, Japan. I wondered how it felt to be sent by a country that had so recently devastated your homeland to wreak a similar devastation on a nearby nation.
More and more, I’m beginning to think that the true mark of assimilation in America is forgetting. If the coalition of all those who have been made victim, refugee, or other had kept aflame within them the knowledge of what this country is capable of — to others, to its own — we may have woken up to a different nation today.
Ascend to the world of the living, and come around the side, and the memorial seals itself up again. You could be standing right before it and miss it, if you were gazing out at Capitol Hill. But watch your step — any second, a hole can open up around your feet, and swallow you whole.
