Family, Inheritance, and Parenthood Theme Analysis

Thi Bui explains that she began researching and writing The Best We Could Do in an attempt to better understand and connect with her Má and Bố (mom and dad)—that is, to “learn to love [her parents] better.” While a wide gulf divides her parents’ experiences from her own, her family sticks together anyway. Her book attempts to understand this contradiction and explain what motivates family to care for one another by investigating her own family’s past. Ultimately, Bui realizes that sacrifice and labor—not blood—bind a family and that, while these sacrifices demand repayment, they can never be fully reciprocated. By recognizing the sacrifices her parents made for their children, Bui learns to become a better parent and child alike.

When she comes of age, Bui, like many American young adults, moves out of her parents’ house. Years later, she returns to California with her husband and son to help care for her aging parents. Her whole family now lives within a short drive of one another, but Bui learns that “proximity and closeness are not the same.” She is emotionally alienated from her parents, unable to grasp their inner lives. And her parents are alienated from one another: although they remain friends, they have long since separated, and they are divided by “a chasm, full of meaning and resentment.” In fact, this has always been the case: Bui never learned about her parents’ and their families’ histories in Việt Nam. And her parents resist discussing their past: Má ignores the subject, while Bố refuses to ever return to Việt Nam and says that “he had no parents.” Hoping that she can grow closer to her parents by “record[ing their] family history,” Bui begins interviewing them for a graduate school project (which is the only reason they agree). This project eventually—after a decade—turns into The Best We Could Do.

Through working on her book, Bui learns about the profound sacrifices her parents made in order to make her own relatively comfortable life possible. Bui is shocked to learn that Bố’s parents effectively abandoned him: his abusive father kicked his mother out (and she moved to China), then joined the Việt Minh, leaving Bố with his grandparents. Years later, Bố had to choose between rejoining his father and moving to Sài Gòn with his grandfather. Bố chose his grandfather, who had invested more in him. Never able to take family ties for granted, Bố understands that his grandparents’ dedication to him was a product of circumstance, but also required deep sacrifice. His story reminds Bui that her parents actively chose to invest in their children’s future, and that their silence about the past was actually a way of protecting her and her siblings.

Má, meanwhile, grew up with distant parents and wanted education and a career rather than a family of her own. Ultimately, she married Bố out of sympathy, because he was severely ill with tuberculosis and everyone expected him to die. When he survived, Má’s gesture of pity gave way to a lifelong obligation to Bố and their children, and she ended up burying her “independent, self-determining, and free” life to support the family she loved but never wanted. But, when retracing her own childhood, Bui realizes that she had never seen Má as anything but her own mother. In comparison to Má’s selfless labor, Bui says, “being [someone’s] child” is like having “a lifetime pass for selfishness.” And Bui ultimately learns two important lessons from her parents’ stories: first, that family is not a given and therefore should not be taken for granted, and second, that family is not always intentionally chosen and therefore it’s possible to be part of a family (and be burdened with obligations to a family) without necessarily intending to.

Building on these two lessons and her own experience as a parent, Bui realizes that what holds family together is not blood, but sacrifice—specifically, the selfless labor of raising children, which can never fully be repaid but calls for unconditional affection and care in return. In her last chapter, Bui asks whether parents can “live on in what we leave to our children.” In other words, she wonders what it is—besides DNA—that children inherit from their parents. Through becoming a parent herself, she realizes that children inherit a sense of obligation. Through the pain of childbirth, she recognizes what Má suffered (six times) to bring her and her siblings into the world. And during the first few days of her son’s life, he is in the hospital and she has to trudge through bitter cold to visit and feed him every few hours. This helps her realize that parents are “called upon to be HEROIC,” and that by realizing that one’s parents have been heroes, one can become a hero for one’s own children when necessary.

Bui also juxtaposes her depiction of this “hardest week of [her] life” with images of Bố piloting the boat that brought the family to freedom and of Má pregnant with Tâm in the Pulau Besar Refugee Camp. This shows that she finally understands, through experience, how much parents must sacrifice for their children. And it is by recognizing this sacrifice that she comes full circle and “learns to love [her parents] better.” First, she sees that their distance is a product of their sacrifice—their desire to avoid exposing their children to their trauma and their discomfort growing old in a country they have adopted for their children’s sake. And secondly, she sees that she must choose to inherit their sense of responsibility and sacrifice—it won’t necessarily happen automatically.

Although she can never fully repay her parents, Má and Bố’s lifelong sacrifice encourages Bui to offer her own children those same sacrifices—to build the committed family she always took for granted, but that her parents never could. As she puts it after giving birth, “FAMILY is now something I have created—and not just something I was born into.”