Becoming American: The Chinese Experience is a Bill Moyers special for PBS airing this week. Within its website are full transcripts of his interviews with five prominent Chinese Americans. Among them is a fascinating interview with Maya Lin, best known as the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a competition she won as a senior at Yale. The conversation touches on much more than her Asian American experience. Lin reveals that her design process begins with writing. In creating text she “sketches” what she wants to accomplish with the piece. “If you have the pre-conceived idea of what you think it looks like before you really shape it verbally, then you’re trying to stuff function into a pre-existing form.” Moyers asks her about the creation of the Civil Rights Memorial and the wonderful Women’s Table at Yale. And of course Moyers goes in depth on her experience with the racism and resistance she encountered as the Asian designer of a monument for an Asian war. With culturally typical restraint she reigned in her emotions throughout the controversy, so as to not worry her parents.