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
Anxious and dressed in winter clothes, Thi’s family arrives in sun-drenched California, where they quickly move from welfare to living on Má’s minimum wage of $3.35 an hour. They are forced to make sacrifices and learn lessons about “what was important to survive”—school, staying together, “lock[ing] the door!” But Má and Bố scarcely amass souvenirs of their life. They have a folder marked “IMORTANT DOCUMENTS,” where “the most essential pieces of [their] identity” are closely-guarded. And each of them get another folder for all their school documents. When Thi is nine years old, Má and Bố get United States citizenship.
Although American readers are probably used to the clichés about immigration, hard work, and freedom, Bui implores them to recognize the particularity and diversity of migration stories rather than fall into the easy trap of grouping all such stories under stereotypes. The lessons Bui and her siblings learn in their youth are all directly related to their parents’ experiences in Việt Nam. School gave them social mobility; staying together allowed them to survive, support one another, and maintain their identities amidst turmoil; and “lock[ing] the door!” is a practical measure to avoid clashing unexpectedly with unsavory characters like the North Vietnamese. The “IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS” folder also speaks volumes about the way Bui’s parents choose to memorialize the past: as they did upon arriving in the United States, they choose not to be burdened with their past as they move forward with their lives there. Of course, while this is to some degree an effective coping strategy for their trauma, it also prevents them from ever fully confronting it, and the silence it leaves behind is what inspired Bui to write this book as a form of remembrance.
Themes
Lan and Bích succeed in high school and go to college while Má takes night classes and eventually becomes a teaching assistant. She convinces Bố to start studying, and he “trie[s] his hand at graphic design.” When Má and Bố are away taking classes, Lan and Bích watch Thi and Tâm, making them spaghetti and telling them stories. Eventually, movies start replacing Lan and Bích as babysitters.
Lan, Bích, and Má all direct their difficult experiences in Việt Nam into tireless work in the United States—and, despite the long depression Bui wrote about in her third chapter, Bố eventually begins to do the same, with some prodding. But the family also still sticks together—at least until the movies come around. They are, as Bui explained in her opening chapters, close by American standards but not necessarily by Vietnamese ones.
Themes
One night during Tết when Thi is 14, there is a loud sound downstairs. The family instinctively hides in their room, but then hears an explosion. Thi realizes they have to run: she grabs the “IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS” folder and goes downstairs in the darkness. As firefighters surround the house, Thi muses that her most important “inheritance” from her parents is this “Refugee Reflex.” Fortunately, Thi’s family’s apartment is not damaged, and they return home and sleep a few hours later.
While the family’s instinct to hide represents one kind of inheritance from Việt Nam—the impulse to hide, as they did in the boat, when under threat—Bui inherits a different kind of awareness of danger: the instinct to run, as the family fled from Sài Gòn. It is notable that she claims this “Refugee Reflex” as the core of her “inheritance,” rather than any particular aspect of Vietnamese culture. The “Refugee Reflex” is physical, subconscious, and instinctive—it is a different kind of memory, one that in turn demonstrates how trauma passes on from generation to generation. It is built into Thi Bui’s very being, rather than something she consciously chooses or pursues. She seems to find a happy medium between Bố’s excessive, overhanging fear and Má’s tendency to ignore the past.
Themes
