Introduction
Before it would become a bestseller, before it had a title, before the first comic was drawn, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do was a project of reconstruction: an attempt to bring together generations of family stories. “I was a graduate student and took a detour from my art education training to get lost in the world of oral history,” writes Bui in the book’s preface. “I was trying to understand the forces that caused my family, in the late seventies, to flee one country and start over in another.”
Dissatisfied with the limits of oral history, Bui turned towards other genres—hunting for a way to weave the personal, political, and historical. “I was inspired by some of the big graphic memoirs like Maus by Art Spiegelman and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi,” shared Bui with The Mary Sue. “And then, I didn’t really want to write a memoir; [but] the oral history needed a protagonist to lead you through the story and I had to volunteer myself.”
The memoir opens with the birth of Bui’s son, an event that shifts the project from a historical reconstruction to a book about parents and children. Life with her new child, rife with potential and uncertainty, catalyzes a realization that family was “now something I have created—and not just something I was born into.” Thus, Bui returns to her parents’ histories: this time not just as their child, but as a parent herself.
The Best We Could Do slips seamlessly between perspectives, voices, and even decades. Bui and her mother, Hằng sit at a kitchen table in Berkeley, California, as Hằng recounts her past in Việt Nam. A moment later, there she is: a little girl diving deep beneath the waves in the coastal town of Nha Trang; surrounded by friends on the lawn of a French lycée; a bright-eyed, ambitious college student meeting Bui’s father, Nam, for the first time.
It takes longer for Bui to find the right questions for her father; but when she does, Nam’s stories come quickly, each of them with “a different shape but the same ending.” Born in 1940, as the world was “plunging headlong into chaos,” Nam grew up in the path of war and famine. Left with his grandparents in Lợi Đông after his father joined the Việt Minh, Nam remains haunted by the violence he witnessed as a child when the village was taken over by French forces during the First Indochina War. Decades later, in an apartment in San Diego, Bui remembers growing up with the terrified boy who would become her father. “Afraid of my father, craving safety and comfort,” she writes, “I had no idea that the terror I felt was only the long shadow of his own.”
This becomes a theme throughout the memoir: history as a shadow and memory as a cycle. “Rewind, Reverse,” reads one chapter title. “Either, Or,” reads another. “Fire and Ash,” “Ebb and Flow.” Bui’s move to New York City after college finds symmetry in Nam’s arrival as a young bachelor in Sài Gòn, reading Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir with freedom on his mind. The birth of Bui’s son is a reminder of Hằng—“How did you do this SIX times?”—whose own labors become stories later on in the book. As Bui traces her family’s escape after the fall of South Việt Nam in 1975, she intersperses her own memories among her parents’, describing the chocolate bar her mother used to distract her and her sisters while Hằng provided translation help at the airport, her glee at seeing snow for the first time at her aunt’s home in Indiana, the two kinds of spaghetti her sisters would make when they came home from college to babysit.
“I keep looking toward the past, tracing our journey in reverse,” writes Bui. “Over the ocean, through the war, seeking an origin story that will set everything right.” Throughout the book, stories are constantly written and rewritten, told by one person and untold by another, “…with no beginning or end—anecdotes without shape, wounds beneath wounds.” With sweeping scale and careful intimacy, Bui mediates memory across generations. In her deft hands, a mother’s love is rendered in a piece of blood sausage. A chessboard becomes a neighborhood; chess pieces become a war. An unassuming brown file folder holds a lifetime’s inheritance.
“What becomes of us after we die?” Bui wonders in the last moments of The Best We Could Do. “Do we live on in what we leave to our children?” It is a question etched into every page of her memoir: what it means to be both parent and child, to translate memory into history, to search for a better future while longing for a simpler past. The book offers no clear answers, only a tribute to complexity: memory and grief, guilt and gratitude, love and sacrifice in all their equal parts. “She does not spare her loved ones criticism or linger needlessly on their flaws,” writes Publishers Weekly. “Likewise she refuses to flatten the twists and turns of their histories into neat, linear narratives. She embraces the whole of it.”
