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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
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
Thi Bui draws her residential neighborhood in Berkeley, California—by 2015, her responsibilities have multiplied: she has a son, a job, and a mortgage. But she rewinds to 1999, when she was a young woman and about to move from San Diego to New York to pursue art. She tells Má that she’ll be living with her boyfriend (who is also an artist), and Má responds, “I see,” with a turned back. Thi tells herself that, “for an immigrant kid,” moving in with a boyfriend is “living the dream.” When Thi’s older sister Lan left home to live with her boyfriend, Má had been denial. Whenever Má called Lan’s house and Lan’s boyfriend picked up the phone, Má hung up immediately: she believed cohabitating before marriage was wrong.
By returning to 1999, Bui shows how completely her life transformed in just a few years, in a way she could not have predicted beforehand. Má’s refusal to sanction Thi’s plans or to acknowledge Lan’s boyfriend shows not only the difference in cultural expectations about family and romance between Việt Nam and the United States, but also suggests that Má—like Thi—is not entirely sure how to make sense of two opposite systems of cultural values. Notably, she does not throw out or threaten Thi and Lan—rather, she chooses to simply ignore the behavior of which she cannot approve.
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But Má and Lan’s disagreement was not nearly the family’s worst. Bích, another of Thi’s sister, tried to hide her boyfriend from Má, who grew furious when she found out. Bích simply leaves home—in the illustration, she leaves a note reading, “I’m sorry.” Má discovers it and takes “a whole bottle of pills” in her room. Lan has already moved out, and Bố tells Thi and her younger brother (Tâm) that Bích “is DEAD to us.” Má recovers, but the family never talks about what happened—Má even thinks Thi has forgotten, but after 30 years, Thi is “still ANGRY.”
By leaving home, Bích threatens the family’s integrity and unity, and Má’s extreme reaction reflects the energy she has put into establishing this family throughout her life. This explosive episode demonstrates how Bui’s family buries its conflicts, which perhaps explains why she did not grow up with a full understanding of the trauma that her parents experienced in Việt Nam and decided to reconstruct and narrate it later.
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Thi Bui presents her family through a series of portraits. There are her parents, Má and Bố, and then her siblings, two of whom—Quyên and Thảo—are depicted as shadows. The other siblings, from oldest to youngest, are Lan, Bích (“pronounced BICK”), Thi, and Tâm. In a drawing of her, Travis, and her son, Thi says that she has made sense of how to be a wife and mother, but still cannot figure out how to be “both a parent and a child, without acting like a child.” Thi depicts her parents as silhouettes, younger than she is now, fleeing Việt Nam in a boat. She wonders if she “will always be a child” to them, and if Má and Bố will always be polar opposites separated by “a chasm, full of meaning and resentment.”
Thi, Travis, and their son move from New York to California in 2006, to be with Thi’s parents. But she realizes that “proximity and closeness are not the same,” as while her entire family lives close by, her parents are still lonely in their old age, longing to be taken care of. In Việt Nam, Má and Bố would be “very old” and expected to live with children—but the United States, they are expected to live on their own. Thi does not know how to resolve these conflicting expectations. She talks it over with Travis in bed.
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Thi remembers meeting Má's mother and Má's father and her uncle Hải when she was 12, after they moved to the United States. The visit was transactional and failed to give her insight into parents. Bố insisted that “he had no parents,” even though he did, and he never went to visit any of his family in Việt Nam. But Thi did go, and this trip inspired her to start “record[ing] our family history” in order to better understand and love her parents. She interviews Má over coffee at their back patio table, in front of the picture she is imagining, a small wooden boat in the ocean. Má answers the questions, but likes to change the subject to more “practical” matters (like dinner). In general, she is not fond of “I love yous.”
Alongside images of Thi Bui’s neighborhood, she asks, “how did we get to such a lonely place?” Looking out over the ocean, she hopes that tracking her family’s lineage back to Việt Nam by “seeking an origin story […] will set everything right.”
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In 1978, Má gives birth to Tâm in a Malaysian refugee camp. She makes dinner during the labor, and does not mention that she is about to give birth until everyone finishes. The family takes Má in a hammock to the water, where she, Hải, and Bố take a boat to the midwife’s hut. She gives birth “quickly [and] without the aid of drugs.”
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In 1974 in Sài Gòn, Má has a stillbirth. Nobody knows why this daughter, Thảo, does not survive. A year later, in 1975, Thi Bui is born. Her parents say she has the face of “Phât Bà Quan Âm, the Goddess of Mercy,” to whom they prayed. Bích is born in 1968, two weeks before the Tết Offensive, during which the family locks itself inside with the radio, to avoid the war on the streets. And Lan is born in 1966, in a rural part of the Mekong Delta, where Má is employed as a teacher.
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Although she is just 22 when Lan is born, Má has just lost another daughter in Sài Gòn. Some Vietnamese people fear that “giv[ing] a baby a beautiful name [means] jealous spirits will come take the baby away,” but Má and Bố name her Giang Quyên, “a name that sounded like and meant GREAT RIVER.” Má and Bố’s families are divided about how to feed Quyên. The formula gets the baby, and she dies soon thereafter in the hospital. Má is devastated. As Thi shifts the scene back to California in the present, she asks how Quyên’s death affected Má’s feelings and hopes for her other children. The past created a “gray stillness” in the family, a lasting sorrow that they did not fully acknowledge or understand but were always aware of.
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