“The Best We Could Do”

At times, Thi Bui’s memoir of growing up in Vietnam and America will both crush you and give you hope.  It’s a reminder in these social distancing times of the value of family, even when we are apart.

Cover by Thi Bui

Written and Illustrated by Thi Bui

This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui’s story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home. In what Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “a book to break your heart and heal it,” The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui’s journey of understanding, and provides inspiration to all of those who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past.

One of the projects I’m hoping to finish in this time of social distancing is putting together my family tree, something started a long time ago thanks to a Christmas gift of an Ancestry.com membership.  Perhaps what actually had me putting off completion of the project for so long (besides expiration of that gift membership) was that the players that I wanted to speak to most, the ones that I know would have the richest stories (my grandparents) are all no longer of this earth. (My grandfathers died before I was born, my maternal grandmother in 1997, and my paternal grandmother, a woman who outlived her own son, my father, longer than we expected, died in 2018.)

Thus I read Thi Bui’s story with a twinge of jealousy. That she was able to sit with her parents, and hear their tale of courtship, marriage, family, and escape when I could not made me a bit angry. What secrets, stories, family traditions did my relatives take to their graves that I would never be able to hear fresh from their lips again? Why didn’t I make the time to write or record them?  When you’re a librarian (and in a relationship with one), you think you would know better!

But by the end, I left with a respect and awe for what she and her family lived through as they tried to escape Vietnam at the end of the war and the beginning of Communist rule. This is a story that needed to be told, and while three years old, couldn’t have come at a better time.

Now I should also put my comments in the context of my dual privilege as a white, fourth generation American childless woman. I did not have to immigrate to these shores. I was born comfortably here, as were my parents and grandparents before.  And by choice, I do not know the joy and pain of being a parent.  So I must concede that I am viewing this through a very different lens than perhaps my Multiversity colleague Paul of the Comics Syllabus podcast, who is both a parent and of Asian descent.  I imagine his perspective on this story will be much different, and I look forward to the day when we can share these thoughts together.

Bui frames her conversations with her parents around the concept of becoming a parent herself, that time when she starts to understand their own struggles and sacrifices but still remains very much their child.  This duality of self allows one foot in present, one foot in past: an appreciation for the life that comes before and the life that she will raise. She flashes between past and distant past: her labor in 2005, her parents’ upbringing in 1940s and 1950s Southeast Asia, the births of her various siblings, coming to Middle America in the late 1970s and 1980s.  Much like Greta Gerwig in her adaptation of Little Women, she does not tell this story in a straight linear format. She flashes between different time periods: first the birth of one her siblings, then using that as a springboard to look back on her parents’ upbringings – – one rich, one poor – – in middle 20th century Vietnam. Then it’s a jump to “present” (2015) and her reflections on these events as she watches her son. Her pacing is even and slow enough, but not too even and slow to bore the reader. In fact, the book’s climax – – the family’s attempt to leave Vietnam by boat – – is dense in words, panels, and pictures to build the right amount of tension (will they make it? will their boat find a patrol boat and meet an untimely end?) but not so dense that it crowds the eye.

The artwork matches the gentleness of script. There’s delicate, simple linework, sometimes underlaid by organic, parchment-style backgrounds.  Many panels look like watercolor paintings, a perfect metaphor for the perfect but still imperfect tool of memory.  Even the most tense of moments, such as the aforementioned boat trip or when young Bo (Thi’s father) confronts the police have this gentle touch. She saves the detail and texture for backgrounds, which give a sense of landscape on metaphorical fire as the dramatis personae seek calm amidst the storm, or the peace of 21st century northern California. It does well to draw the eye to the characters first and place second. But it also doesn’t put place totally in the background.  She concedes one cannot exist without the other: “And that if I could see Viet Nam as a real place, and not a symbol of something list . . . I would see my parents as real people . . . and learn to love them better.”

My lone fault with this book is in colors. Using a monochromatic tone of orange-red as the sole color in the book does ensure that character is first, not distracted by color.  There is, however, an opportunity here to use color to present a time shift to show that passage of time, or jumps between past and present.  It can stay in the monochrome; this is not a story that needs to be told in four-color.  This is, a 300+ page book, and meandering attention spans could use the help of a slight change in background color to keep focus on the story.

I write this review today on Easter Sunday, a very different Easter Sunday in our COVID-19 world. While my small family of two does not have large celebrations, calling my out of state mother today took on a very different tone (and I admit, I broke down on the phone with her twice). Pope Francis, in his Easter remarks, spoke of the “contagion of hope” that keeps us going in these very dark moments.

Thi Bui’s family story fits that just beautifully.