Thi Bui

As she recounts in The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui was born in Sài Gòn, South Việt Nam, in early 1975, shortly before the end of the Vietnam War. Three years later, she and her family escaped Việt Nam by boat to Malaysia and then to the United States, where she grew up in California. She went on to study art and law as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, then trained as a sculptor in New York and received an MFA. from Bard College. Although she began exhibiting her work around the city, she soon changed paths and decided to become a public school teacher. While studying art education at New York University, she began to interview her family for a final project on Việt Nam, and she realized that comics would be the most appropriate medium for telling their story. She began learning to draw them and, over more than a decade, wrote The Best We Could Do while slowly working through her family’s history. Meanwhile, she taught high school art in New York and then in Oakland, California, in an alternative school for recent immigrants. She taught her students to write their own stories as graphic novels and, after several years, published an anthology of them as the book We Are Oakland International. During this time period, she also exhibited art and published academic writing in various galleries, magazines, and journals. Since 2015, she has taught graduate students in comics at the California College of the Arts. But she has only become a prominent name in the comic book world since 2017, when she published The Best We Could Do to critical acclaim after more than a decade of work. Her book won an American Book Award, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and the Eisner Award (the most important award for comic books), and was selected as mandatory reading for first-year students in at least a dozen colleges and universities around the United States. In 2018, Bui contributed to her friend (and acclaimed Vietnamese American novelist) Việt Thanh Nguyễn’s anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and illustrated the Vietnamese American poet Bao Phi’s children’s book A Different Pond. In 2019, as though to combine these two projects, she and her son Hiển collaborated with Nguyễn and Nguyễn’s son Ellison to create another children’s book, Chicken of the Sea. She has also published many of her political comics on the website The Nib. She has emphatically declared that The Best We Could Do will be her only memoir, and she is now turning her energy to conducting journalism through comic books. In her next project, she seeks to document the projected effects of climate change on farmers in southern Việt Nam’s Mekong Delta.