Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Best We Could Do, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family, Inheritance, and Parenthood
Intergenerational Trauma
Assimilation, Belonging, and Cultural Identity
Repression and Freedom
Memory and Perspective
Summary
Analysis
In 2005, Thi Bui is about to give birth in a New York hospital. She is in pain, but Má (her mother) has left the delivery room. Instead, Bui’s husband, Travis, comforts her. Má is anxiously waiting in the hallway, even though she came from California for the birth.
Birth is not only an emotionally intense and dramatic place to start Bui’s story. It also shows how family and inheritance are to some extent based in trauma in the form of the severe pain Bui experiences, which is necessary for the next generation to come into being. Má, too, is visibly pained, which suggests that watching her daughter give birth has triggered some traumatic memories of her own—from the start, then, Má’s difficult past is connected to the future Thi Bui is building for herself and her son.
Themes
After a whole night of labor, Thi Bui’s face shows her anguish, and she begins to wonder if she should take anesthesia. She planned not to, and she worries that the drugs will make her into “the baby and not the mother.” The doctor rambles on about the medicine and Thi worries about her mother, who is vomiting in the hospital bathroom. A nurse brings a “tray of surgical instruments.” This reminds Thi of overhearing Bố tell Má a graphic story about someone being raped with scissors.
Bui feels a sense of guilt about the prospect of taking anesthesia and ceasing to be fully psychologically present. She also clearly worries that it might adversely affect Má, who will end up caring for her and calling her back into the role of a child, “not the mother” she is becoming. Medicine and physical pain are, it seems, clearly tied to violence and fear for Bui and her family; it points to some trauma embedded in their past.
Themes
The doctor arrives and insists that Thi Bui decide about the anesthesia—Thi agrees, despite not wanting to. It is “the beginning of [her] defeat—” the doctor inserts a huge plastic tube into her back. Thi asks the doctor not to do an episiotomy, but the doctor says she will “do what’s necessary,” because sometimes babies can “tear [their mothers] open from front to back!” Thi covers her ears and tells the doctor to stop.
Bui is terrified that the medical procedures surrounding childbirth will deprive her of her autonomy over her body; an episiotomy is likened to getting raped with scissors, only under the care of a doctor who sees it as routine procedure and Bui as just another patient. This contrasts with the stories Bui later tells about Má giving birth, which always happens unmedicated and under the care of an empathetic midwife.
Themes
Later, in a daze, Thi Bui tries to push but “can’t feel anything.” As “hands descend upon” her, Má lingers in the corner of the room, and Travis holds and comforts her. At last, through the haze of the epidural, Thi gives birth, and “a little voice” comes out of her son, who is drawn falling out of a cloud of smoke. He has “a faraway face with old man eyes.” Thi thinks “don’t let him fall,” and she holds him to her belly before the nurse takes him away and he starts to cry. While Thi deals with the placenta, “Má seems to be revitalized, and plays with the baby.
Having admitted “defeat” and agreeing to take the drugs, Bui is not completely lucid as she gives birth, and she acknowledges that this distortion in her perspective is an important part of the narrative. Her description of her son is uncanny, highlighting the newborn’s “old” and “faraway” traits as though to connect him to the generations that proceeded him and perhaps even to Việt Nam. Bui gives a whole page to depict just her son coming out of the cloud of smoke that represents her, which slows down the narrative and allows the reader to absorb the emotional intimacy of the moment, before on the next page the doctors abruptly interrupt it by yanking Bui’s baby away from her.
Themes
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Má and Travis leave, and the nurse takes Thi to another room, where the baby gets a crib by her side. The nurse tells Thi, “Here is your baby. Good night!” Thi nurses her crying baby to calm him, then sees what appears to be Death—but is really just her hospital roommate—behind the room’s curtain. This other woman talks jovially to her new daughter, who seems to take to breastfeeding easily. The women and their babies keep one another awake all night.
Again, Bui’s experience is emotionally alienating because the singularity and importance of her new son to her contrasts with the routine and mechanistic way the nurse approaches relocating them. Similarly, while she is jarred by the new life in her arms, the other woman in her room seems to be perfectly fulfilling the social expectations of a new mother. In a sense, by consistently drawing out this contrast between “inside” and “outside” perspectives throughout this chapter, Bui foreshadows the rest of the book, recounting the personal stories and emotional upheavals that lie behind otherwise sterile, impersonal, “objective” narratives of history.
Themes
The following morning, a concerned-looking Thi Bui learns about diapers and breastfeeding. Soon, Má and Travis come, “bring[ing] food and RELIEF.” Má’s phở helps Bui a feel a little more at home. Refreshed, Thi watches her sleeping son “with fresh eyes.” Má tells Thi about giving birth alone, while “your father went to the movies!” Thi tells Travis he is “wonderful” and reveals to the reader that “it took Má twenty-eight years to leave Bố.” After this, Má leaves with Travis to rest at home. On the way out, Thi asks Má, “how did YOU do this SIX times?” Má explains that the pain is easy to forget—but watching her daughter give birth brought the memories back.
Má and Travis return and infuse the alien, imposing, impersonal hospital with the sights and smells of family. Unlike many American mothers, Bui does not view herself and her child as an independent unit; rather, her sense of identity as a mother is inextricably tied to her relationships with the rest of her family, and this already signals that she has to navigate the tension between Vietnamese and American cultural expectations about the structure of family. Bui also explicitly connects her experience giving birth with Má’s six births, which happened under very different conditions, and it is clear that Bui’s motherhood is already changing the way she thinks about and relates to her mother. Finally, Má’s comments about memory foreshadow the difficulties Bui encounters in the rest of her book, as she interviews her family members about traumatic memories they may rather not revisit.
Themes
Again alone with her son, Thi Bui realizes that she has contributed to her family for this first time—her lineage is no longer something she was merely “born into.” She notes that “the responsibility is immense” and feels a newfound sense of empathy for Má. The chapter ends with a large drawing of Bui’s own face, weathered and asleep.
Bui makes it clear that becoming a mother does not only change her own sense of identity; it also changes the way she thinks about the rest of her family, especially her mother. She now realizes that family is not always a given—in her case, it was something she actively chose and for which she must now actively take responsibility. And in Má’s case, Bui realizes, family must have also introduced new responsibilities and reshaped Má’s identity in ways she could not have predicted. So Bui not only comes to see the “immense” amount of “responsibility” Má took on to raise her; she also realizes that Má must have been a different person before becoming a mother.
Themes
