In her graphic memoir The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui retraces her parents’ lives in Việt Nam and the United States in an attempt to better articulate her own identity and understand the “gray stillness” that has always lurked in the background of her family. Bui’s book begins with three different prefaces: a short written explanation of how she began the project that became The Best We Could Do in graduate school and finished it after more than a decade of trial and error; a comic-strip preface that depicts her meeting one of her idols, the Vietnamese American writer Việt Thanh Nguyễn; and an illustrated timeline of Vietnamese history, focusing on the period of war from 1945-1975, which roughly coincides with the period during which her parents lived in Việt Nam.
Bui’s first chapter begins in 2005, with her giving birth in New York City. Her husband Travis, is by her side, but her Má (Vietnamese for “Mom”) is hiding outside the waiting room, unable to watch her daughter in pain and confront her own memories of giving birth. After reluctantly agreeing to take anesthesia, Bui gives birth to a baby with “a faraway face with old man eyes,” whom she draws emerging from a cloud of smoke. She spends the night with her son, but she is more confused than overjoyed. The next morning, Má brings Bui phở and tells her about how her father (whom she calls Bố) did not even show up for the majority of her six children’s births. Bui reflects on “FAMILY,” which “is now something [she has] created” rather than “just something [she] was born into.”
In Chapter Two, Bui fast-forwards to 2015 in California, where she, Travis, and her son are living with Má and down the street from Bố. She remembers the huge fight that ensued when she, like her older sisters Lan and Bích, decided to move out of her parents’ house and in with her boyfriend. Now “both a parent and a child,” her conflicts with her family are more internal: she does not know whether to hold herself to the Vietnamese expectation of sacrificing her career to care for her parents, or the American expectation of having them live alone and independently for as long as possible. She has never even been particularly close to her parents, who were always reluctant to talk about the past and their families in Việt Nam. Bui presents each of her siblings and narrates each of their births, which were all in Việt Nam except that of her younger brother Tâm, who was born in a refugee camp in Malaysia.
In Chapter Three, Bui looks back to her childhood, when her family has difficulty coping with the American way of life. Bố refuses to take a minimum wage job, so he stays at home while Má works. He does not do much for the children besides scare them: mostly, he tells spends his days chain-smoking and going after mysterious threats to the family, like “that PERVERT across the street” who he tells Thi is watching her. Young Thi feels that she has to be brave to protect her family from these threats.
In Chapter Four, Bui explores how Bố became so withdrawn and paranoid. She retells his early life to uncover his “wounds beneath wounds.” The earliest detail known about his family is that his grandfather and father show up in a village near the northern Vietnamese city of Hải Phòng in the early 20th century. His grandfather marries the village chief’s daughter and his father an ordinary girl from the village. After his birth, however, Bố’s mother, father, and grandfather defraud his grandmother, stealing her precious opium jars and moving off to Hải Phòng during World War II. This is a difficult time—there is a famine, and the family is lucky to find anything but small portions of rice and stewed vegetables to eat. To add insult to injury, Bố’s abusive father kicks his mother out, leaving her to die in the famine, and then disappears to join the Việt Minh revolutionaries. Bố is left alone with his grandfather, who brings him back to the village and his forgiving grandmother. However, the village is soon massacred by French troops, which seven-year-old Bố witnesses while hiding away in an underground shelter. The Việt Minh then stage a counterattack, which means the chief’s family—including Bố and his grandparents—must get out as soon as possible. Reflecting on her father’s history, Bui comes to understand why he was so traumatized during her own youth: she “grew up with the terrified boy who became [her] father,” and her childhood fear was “only the long shadow of his own.”
In her fifth chapter, Bui turns to Má’s early life, which is luxurious compared to Bố’s. Má’s father is a prominent engineer in the French colonial government, so Má grows up comfortably in Cambodia and Nha Trang. Her mother is distant, and she spends most of her time reading—in fact, her academic promise leads her to a series of French colonial schools, where she learns two important lessons. First, she realizes that colonialism is oppressing her people and the Vietnamese need to obtain independence. And secondly, she learns that—as Bui puts it—“MARRIAGE = TRAP,” but “EDUCATION = FREEDOM.” Bui wonders how her parents ended up together anyway. The answer is the Sài Gòn Teachers College. After his grandparents become successful shopkeepers in Hải Phòng, Bố moves into a French school—which is then dissolved, forcing him to move to Sài Gòn. After Việt Nam is divided in two, his father reconnects with him and tries to convince him to stay in Hà Nội. But Bố refuses—he is horrified by the poverty he sees in the North, and he wants to stick with his grandfather, who actually raised him. As Bui explains in Chapter Six, Bố proceeds to Sài Gòn, where his grandparents live in the dense working-class neighborhood of Bàn Cờ, and then he joins the Teachers College to avoid the military draft imposed by Ngô Đình Diệm’s government. Meanwhile, Má ends up in the same college because it guarantees her independence and a career.
But Má soon gets pregnant, so she marries Bố even though her family does not approve of his working-class bloodline. And the drama does not end there: Bố also has severe tuberculosis that is very likely to be fatal. Decades later, Má finally admits to Thi that she was always hoping to “make his last years happy […] and then be free as a widow.” But Bố recovers and Má soon gives birth to their first child, Quyên, who dies as an infant under mysterious circumstances. Má and Bố are devastated and move to the Mekong Delta to try and recuperate. However, this coincides with the American invasion, which destroys the South Vietnamese economy and makes Má and Bố’s wages worthless. They move back to Sài Gòn only to suffer repression at the hands of the government during the next decade of war. They have and raise Lan, Bích, and Thi—who is born three months before Liberation Day.
In Chapter Seven, Thi Bui reveals how her parents’ fortunes only worsened after the end of the Vietnam War. Although Liberation Day was relatively peaceful, the new Northern government soon deems Bố “ngụy,” or deceitful, and fires him from his teaching job. The family notes government spies watching them and loses all their wealth through economic shocks. After Má’s brother Hải disappears, the family realizes that it needs to escape and begins planning in collaboration with Hải’s wife, Kiều.
When Hải miraculously gets out of prison, it is time for the family’s escape attempt—even though Má is eight months pregnant. They board a boat at night and hide below deck while the pilot, Mr. Châu, guides them toward international waters. However, the boat runs up against an island and attracts the attention of police patrols. The adults hide and quiet the children with valium, while Mr. Châu spends hours unsticking the boat from the island. Fortunately, the police move on, and when the high tide comes, the boat breaks free of the shore. Mr. Châu returns to the boat, but he is too traumatized to pilot it, so Bố takes over and guides everyone to the high seas. They celebrate that night, and after a few days they reach the Malaysian coast, where locals bring them to the Pulau Besar refugee camp.
Thi Bui’s eighth chapter picks up at the refugee camp in Malaysia, where Má is ready to give birth. She goes to the hospital but insists on returning to care for her children in the camp, where Tâm is born. Má and Bố debate where and how to apply for asylum, and they settle on joining Má’s sister Ðào in the United States. When they arrive, the girls struggle to assimilate into the American way of life and get along with Ðào’s family, who have already lived in the United States for three years. Indiana’s cold winters are the nail in the coffin, and Má and Bố decide to follow Hải to sunny California.
In Chapter Nine, the Bui family arrives and begins to build a life in California. Má takes a job building circuits in a factory for $3.35 an hour and the kids adjust to school. Lan and Bích become overachievers, and they still frequently come home from college to babysit Thi and Tâm. One day, there is an explosion downstairs, and the family instinctively hides. But Thi realizes that it is more dangerous to stay inside, not go outside, and so she convinces the rest to flee. She muses that this is evidence of her inheriting a “Refugee Reflex.”
The tenth and last chapter of Thi Bui’s book picks up where the first chapter left off, in the New York hospital after she gives birth. She reflects on the lessons she has learned from interviewing her parents and considers how she may apply them to her own parenting. In fact, like her Má and Bố during the escape attempt, Bui is “called upon to be HEROIC” in her son’s first week of life: he develops jaundice and has to stay in the hospital, while she has to visit him every 90 minutes to breastfeed. As she speaks to him in Vietnamese, Thi remembers her own mother’s voice and notes that she never thought of her mother as the “independent, self-determining, and free” woman that she actually was before marrying Bố—and perhaps would have remained had she not made that fateful choice. Bui realizes that she has now sacrificed some of her freedom for her son’s sake, but she hopes that he will have “a new life,” one defined not by “war and loss” but by the chance to “be free.”
