Memory and Perspective Theme Analysis

Beyond its importance as a narrative of immigration and daily life in 20th-century Vietnam, The Best We Could Do is also celebrated as a pioneering work in a genre of illustrated nonfiction increasingly referred to as “graphic memoir.” Noticeably, Thi Bui did not draw comics before beginning The Best We Could Do, but rather learned the art form for this project. As she explains in her brief preface to the book, she chose the comic book medium in order to “present history in a way that is human and relatable and not oversimplified.” So it goes without saying that her drawings are central to the narrative: they express most of its emotional detail and many of its more complex storylines. But, beyond telling a different kind of story and eschewing a single perspective, the comic book format allows Bui to make a broader argument about the way history is narrated and remembered. Usually, these forces are opposed: while historical narratives claim to speak about the totality of events, memories are unique, individual, and therefore often deemed irrelevant to the “big picture” of what happened. Bui, however, argues that historical narrative and individual memory must be connected, so that history can be personalized and personal experience given its proper historical context.

The Best We Could Do cannot be understood without examining the relationship between the illustrations and the dialogue. Bui uses these illustrations to express a layer of complexity and ambiguity that cannot be adequately narrated through words. Many of the characters (especially Bui and her sisters during the family’s escape from Việt Nam) are distinguished only by their outfits: it is difficult to know who is doing what without paying attention to who consistently wears what clothing in the images. For instance, Bui often draws herself and Má in red when they give birth. This visual cue signals the connection between them as mothers, which points to the way Bui ultimately learns to deeply respect her mother and follow in her footsteps at the end of the book. (In a sense, when Bui gives birth and dons red, she becomes a new incarnation of her mother.)

And Bui uses visual elements to imply relationships and feelings that would distract from the linear narrative if inserted into the dialogue. For instance, on page 71, Bố’s cigarette unleashes a cloud of smoke that floats out of the panel in which he is sitting, and into the panels in which the author and her brother Tâm are playing. This meandering smoke represents the way his presence seeps into and affects his children’s lives, even though he does not usually interact with them. Many of Bui’s best-known (and arguably most powerful) illustrations from this book are uncanny images of solitude: single figures surrounded by vast expanses of ocean, empty space, smoke, etc., as on the title page within the book and pages 11, 36, 40, 41, 85, 248, 249, 323, and 329. These illustrations represent the sense of simultaneous alienation and freedom that many of the people in Bui’s family encounter as they migrate from one place to another and face uncertain futures. In all these instances, the full sense of Bui’s narrative is impossible to grasp without examining her images more closely than her words.

Just as Bui uses comic books’ hybrid form to narrate her family’s story in a “human and relatable” way that still captures its complexity, she suggests that personal experiences and historical fact should be merged to tell hybrid stories about events like the Vietnam War and its aftermath, which are simultaneously personal and global. Many critics have noted that Bui integrates a relatively extensive account of Việt Nam’s history in the 20th century into her book. Beyond the timeline she offers before the first chapter, she consistently looks at how her parents’ experiences reflected historical developments at the time and relate to the experiences of other Vietnamese people. She reminds the reader that there are endless other first-person stories like her family’s, which always lie behind the history so often learned about from a third-person, ostensibly omniscient perspective. She writes that “every casualty in war is someone’s grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, brother, sister, child, lover.”

And because any historical event encompasses endless personal narratives, Bui emphasizes, there are multiple sometimes-contradictory sides to every story. For instance, she notes that some Vietnamese people remember the fall of Sài Gòn as “Liberation Day” and others, including her family, as “The Day We Lost Our Country.” She also constantly notes that Americans learn an incomplete and biased picture about the Vietnam War—her book is, in part, intended as an alternative. But Bui also does not suggest that her parents’ memories are always correct: she recognizes that memories are fallible, and that they change through the very act of remembering. (This, she jokes, explains many of the disagreements between Má and Bố). Ultimately, then, Bui’s story does not aim to be definitive, but rather to strike down the very idea that a definitive single story can be told about historical events. By juggling words and images, personal narrative and historical fact, she emphasizes the complexity and multidimensionality of all experience, while nevertheless insisting that a reader’s responsibility is to try and get as many angles as possible on the truth.