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
Má and Bố separated decades ago. They are still friends who care for each other, but disagree about many things. For instance, Thi asks Bố if he actually went to see movies during his children’s births. He gets furious and denies this, but Má gets him to admit that he did skip most of the births. He excuses this by saying that he was not allowed into the room, and that he was afraid Má would die in childbirth and leave him all alone.
Má and Bố’s relationship, like Bố’s reaction to Má’s accusation, is based on a kind of hope for the worst: Má and Bố continue caring for each other because they have no one else and feel an obligation to sustain each other, and Bố claims to have skipped the birth out of his own fear. In both cases, this pessimism is clearly related to Má and Bố’s difficult experiences and unaddressed trauma in Việt Nam.
Themes
Thi remembers the concrete apartment building where her family first lives in “claustrophobic darkness” after moving to the United States. Thi’s neighborhood and school teach her about “Americanhood,” but racism from the community and the family’s lingering trauma and struggles at home present challenges. Má and Bố’s college degrees do not count in the US. Má finds Bố a minimum-wage job, but he does not want it, so she takes it instead.
Since Bui has no recollection of her earliest years in Việt Nam, her memories of childhood are specifically about feeling trapped and alone in the United States, both by a family she could not understand and by a foreign culture she was expected to conform to (but was always told she did not belong to). Má and Bố’s difficulties finding work reflect a harsh reality for immigrants whose qualifications are devalued and who are treated as an underclass because their first language is not English. This is particularly ironic because Má and Bố were highly-educated teachers in their home country. While Bố is understandably reluctant to accept the affront to his dignity that minimum-wage work represents, Má realizes that she has no other option and puts her family above her autonomy and sense of self.
Themes
So Bố becomes a stay-at-home parent, but he is not particularly good at it. He chain-smokes and occasionally lashes out in anger at Thi and Tâm, the youngest children, who are not yet in school. He scares them, using “scary stories […] to educate” and convincing Thi that a perverted man who lives across the street is spying on her and will come after her. Tâm spends his days hidden away in the closet, and Thi reading Bố’s “supernatural” books. They play outside with Lan and Bích in the afternoons, until Má comes home at night.
Although Bui does not say it until later in the book, Bố is clearly depressed. It’s implied that he had a traumatic early life in Việt Nam and is now unable to make sense of the fact that, having survived war and escaped persecution by his own government, his reward is to be sent to an unfamiliar country and asked to do unfulfilling work. He clearly cannot imagine his children’s perspectives and continues to imagine that he lives in the dangerous environment in which he grew up: his memories take control of his present.
Themes
The kids are allowed to watch anything and sleep whenever they want. On the weekends, they accompany Má and Bố to family parties, and then Bố drunkenly drives the family home. On the way, Thi dreams that they are on a highway to hell, and then that she is lost on her tricycle, never to make it home. Bố is interested in astral projection, and even has some funny stories about it from Việt Nam. So he “practice[s] leaving his body” during the night, while Thi “practice[s] being brave” to impress her siblings. She illustrates herself traversing the dark house to get water from the “scary” kitchen—she reminds herself that dead people aren’t allowed to talk to the living because they exist “on different planes.” Her bravery lets her relax and fall asleep, and she dreams about freedom.
Má and Bố’s hands-off parenting style, far from typical in the United States (although closer to the norm in the 1980s than today), shows that they are embroiled in their own concerns—Má in work and providing for her children, and Bố in his world of memories, parties, and astral projection. Bui realizes that this is not normal or healthy but does not understand why; when she begins to brave the apartment’s unspoken dangers, she sees that Bố’s concerns reside in his mind. But the constant sense of danger and fear that hangs over the family, a relic from their time in Việt Nam, is the “gray stillness” Bui talked about in the previous chapter. Bố’s interest in astral projection—escaping his body at night—is a way of seeking freedom from himself and his past. At the end of the chapter, Bui realizes that she, too, has similar dreams of freedom—but freedom from the dark present, full of invisible threats that she cannot understand.
Themes
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