The Best We Could Do

A violent, dastardly man who spends his early life following his father (Bố’s grandfather) to the village of Bố’s grandmother (who is not his actual mother) and then to Hải Phòng. He marries a girl from this village, Bố’s mother, but quickly starts having affairs and beating her. He eventually kicks her out, leaving her for dead during a severe famine—but she survives. To avoid the famine, Bố’s father joins the Việt Minh and goes “off to fight for the revolution,” leaving Bố all alone with his grandparents. Bố’s father resurfaces years later in Hà Nội and tries to encourage Bố to join him and his (third) family in a rural part of North Việt Nam. But Bố is horrified at the poverty he sees in the North Vietnamese countryside and feels no sense of obligation toward the father who abandoned him, so chooses to instead move south to Sài Gòn with his grandfather (who actually raised him). Bố’s father’s gestures to the ideal of the unified family are clearly a thinly-veiled attempt to manipulate and control his son, which illustrate one of Bui’s central points about family: blood relations are less important than the labor and sacrifice that family members put into sustaining and supporting one another. Many years later, something similar happens in Sài Gòn. Bố’s father visits with news about Bố’s mother—she is alive and living in China—and then asks to “forgive and forget,” but reveals that they cannot reunite because of politics. Bố feels this is too little, too late, and he sends his father away, never to see him again.