Introduction

The Best We Could Do is a graphic memoir by Vietnamese American cartoonist Thi Bui, published in 2017. The book explores Thi’s experience as a first-time parent, as well as her family’s history in Vietnam and, after the Vietnam War, as immigrants to the US. While working on the book as a graduate student at New York University, Thi visited Vietnam and interviewed her parents, asking to hear stories from their lives. The memoir examines parenthood and family, the long-lasting effects of war on families and children, and the difficulties of immigration, diaspora, displacement, and cultural assimilation.

Plot Summary

Thi Bui begins her memoir with the birth of her first child, a son, in New York City in 2005. From there, she begins to tell her family’s story, filling in the gaps in her own knowledge and memory and interweaving her family history with the history of Vietnam. Thi learns that her parents, called Ma and Bo, led very different early lives—while Ma grew up in relative wealth and privilege in the southern Vietnamese city of Nha Trang, supported by loving parents and attending French schools, Bo grew up in northern Vietnam, where he was abandoned by an abusive father who joined Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist liberation movement, the Viet Minh. Bo and his grandparents, who raised him after his father’s departure, struggled for survival in the chaotic wake of World War II, when Vietnam was occupied by the French and Japanese. He feared what would happen were a communist regime to take over, witnessed the execution of political prisoners, and at one point, narrowly escaped being executed himself. From his stories, Bui gains a new understanding of her father’s sometimes frightening moods.

Ma and Bo met at a teacher’s college in southern Vietnam and eventually graduated and married. At the time, Vietnam had freed itself from French control, but a new conflict was looming in the form of civil war between North and South Vietnam. In 1955, the war officially began, and the US, eager to fight communism wherever it took hold, quickly joined South Vietnam in fighting against the communist North.

In the late 1970s, when the North had finally won the war, Bo and a pregnant Ma fled South Vietnam with the young Thi and her older sisters, Lan and Bich. They became one family among the thousands known as “boat people,” South Asian refugees forced to make a dangerous sea journey away from an equally dangerous homeland. Thi describes how her book is “tracing our journey in reverse . . . over the ocean . . . through the war, seeking an origin story, that will set everything right.”

After a few months in a refugee camp in Malaysia, where Thi's brother, Tam, was born, the family immigrated to the US, where they had relatives in Chicago, and eventually moved to San Diego. Together they learned to adapt to their new lives, language, and home—an easier process for Thi and her siblings than for their parents, whose teaching qualifications weren’t recognized in the US and who studied while working minimum-wage jobs and mourning the loss of two children who had died in infancy.

Thi Bui ends her memoir contemplating her new role as a mother and the future she wants to provide for her son. She recognizes that the pain endured by her family has shaped her, and she hopes that by telling their story, she can free her son from the weight of inherited trauma.