The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir

I loved this book. I devoured the entire thing in one sitting on a Sunday afternoon. It's a beautiful and tragic and warm story all at the same time. I feel like a lot of times when we hear about the Vietnam war in the United States, it's told from the perspective of American soldiers rather than the Southern Vietnamese who lost their home land. Really refreshing to see this diverse and nuanced perspective. I look forward to Thi Bui's future works.

As soon as I finished the first scene of The Best We Could Do my lips started to tremble. I knew I was in for it. This book is uniquely evocative of a time, a place and experience that many of us refugees assume is normal. It’s not normal, even if it’s a familiar refugee experience. I’m a new mom, born the same year as the author in Saigon, and we escaped on a boat one year after her family did. This book hit really close to home. Reading about the Vietnamese experience in the form of a comic book strips the experience down to its bare roots. And those roots are complex, rough, and beautiful. The Best We Could Do is an absolute treasure. I know what I’ll be giving to my closest friends this year for Christmas. Those who read it will understand the Vietnamese experience more deeply. Thanks to Bill Gates for recommending this book among his top 5 for 2017 reads!

I first learned about this book only a week ago when visiting my sister for Thanksgiving in Eugene, Oregon. We went to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art where I saw some work on display by the author, and there was a copy of her book available to look at, so I perused through and decided to buy it and read it. I'm so glad that I did! This is an incredible, poetic story that spans four generations, multiple wars and conflicts, and examines the fragility of the author's relationship with her parents and with her sense of place and motherhood. This book is one of the best I've read in a long time, and the art is moving and beautiful. It gave me new insight into the struggles of refugee life, and created a truly relatable narrative. I devoured this story in one Saturday. I highly recommend it.

After the birth of her son, Thi Bui feels an increased sense of urgency about learning the stories of her own parents. Like all but her youngest sibling, she was born in Vietnam, though the children came of age in the United States. While the war itself haunts all of them, was the reason they left their homeland, the wounds her parents bear go far beyond the military conflict. This was only the second graphic novel I’ve ever read (both have been memoirs), and like the first was also selected by my book club. I feel like the limitations of the format mean it will always be a less preferred one for me, because I found myself wanting more words, more depth to the writing itself. But the story is deeply compelling, detailing her father’s brutal childhood, her mother’s much softer one, how they came together, and how the Vietnam War disrupted the future they thought they might have. It’s not as straightforward as “Americans bad”, and Bui is not afraid of the moral ambiguity of that time and place, where the best interests of the majority of the Vietnamese people was an open question for larger forces that seemed to have little room for consideration of what might have actually made regular lives easier to lead. And apart from the larger geopolitical machinations around them, the family had their own share of tragedy, including the death of their first child and a later stillbirth. But three living children and another on the way was enough for her parents to make frantic arrangements to leave, finally succeeding and eventually making their way to the United States. But of course, that was not the end of their story, just the beginning of a new chapter. Bui’s childhood as she depicts it makes it clear that it wasn’t the stuff dreams are made of, but what shines through is her tremendous empathy for her parents and how they became the people she experienced them as. Overarching the narrative is a meditation on parenthood, as it is the birth of her own child that inspires her to ask her parents more. They might have made major mistakes, but it is clear that they loved their children and did what they thought was best for them, making countless sacrifices to give them the best opportunities possible, even if that love was not always shown the way that they wanted and needed to feel it. Vietnamese perspectives on the war in their country were not something I was exposed to growing up (honestly the Vietnam War itself wasn’t something I remember being taught with particular rigor in high school apart from its connection to electoral politics), and I appreciated learning more about the history of the country and how the people who actually lived through the conflict thought about it. Even though this is not my preferred format, I think Bui uses it well to engage in some non-linear storytelling and to very literally illustrate what she’s trying to get it, like the way she parallels the way her relatively rural parents must have felt seeing Saigon for the first time with the way she felt when she first moved to New York, a sense of awe and possibility. It’s a powerful, moving work and I would recommend picking it up!

An excerpt from my analysis essay I submitted for my literature course: By revisiting her family’s past from before, during, and after the Vietnam War, she gained a deeper understanding of the emotional burdens her parents carried and the sacrifices they made that defined the entirety of their lives. Bui’s illustrated graphic memoir reveals that trauma does not simply disappear over time; instead, it becomes inherited, processed, and transformed. Through this process, Thi Bui is able to move toward empathy for her parents, acceptance of who they are, and a more complete sense of self.

Full review on nguyentoread.com The Best We Could Do is Thi Bui's graphic memoir. Thi was born in Vietnam three months before the Vietnam War reached what we consider to be the end of the war. She came to America with her family in 1978. Bui's memoir spans multiple generations. In learning of her mother's and father's pasts, we learn the history of their parents. We see the struggles and pains of two people from very different walks of life trying to live during a time of war and chaos. We see glimpses of the agony everyone in the middle of the Vietnam War faced. Those who were not directly involved on either side but were caught in the middle of larger powers at war. This memoir more closely details the lives of her parents leading up to them arriving in America and making their life there. I was unsure if this memoir would focus largely on the experience of being a Vietnamese immigrant in America. There were parts that showed how it was for Bui's parents in a country where tensions were still high after the Vietnam War, where discrimination largely due to that was overt, and where degrees were not recognized and people who had spent their lives working and creating careers for themselves were not qualified for most work and had to hurdle multiple challenges to learn a language and complete education all over again if they wanted to provide a better life for their children. What Bui so beautifully captures in this memoir is the why behind how her parents were in raising her. Although Bui was born in Vietnam she was young when her family arrived in America. So I think her experience is one that many first generation Vietnamese-American people of my generation can understand and sympathize with. The wanting to know why their parents are the way they are but unable to ask because many have parents, like Bui's mother, who reluctantly share their stories and don't allow their children that glimpse that could help them better understand. In the panel which was most poignant to me, Bui draws her father as he looks over her work that would become The Best We Could Do. He says "You know how it was for me. And why later I wouldn't be... normal."

This book tells the story of a Vietnamese immigrant family that came to the U.S in 1978, but what happened before their emigration at least as important as what has happened since. In the sense it describes the whole immigrant experience, focusing on an individual and family level. It also shows the U.S. war in Vietnam from the perspective of ordinary Vietnamese, not one that we often see. The book is hard to read at times -- the family goes through hell -- but ultimately hopeful. A beautiful book.

I loved the raw depictions of vietnamese history and human emotions. I recommend this book to anyone experiencing intergenerational trauma. 5 stars, this book helped me understand my father and mother just a little more, and that is priceless

Riveting reading. The illustrations complement the honest no-frills text beautifully. Well worth the read. I had the privilege of being the author’s Uber driver to the airport when she visited Perth . Chatting to her I learnt about this graphic novel she’d written over a 10 year labour of love, so I wanted to buy a copy to read. A wonderful and informative traumatic family history, excellent read!

reçu à temps et dans le même état que promis.

Muy buen servicio

I've read this as an e-book on my Note Air 3C. This is a very special, very personal story. As far as I understood, it's the personal story of the author's family. Even though it is a graphic novel and may sometimes look like a childs comics, and even there are children in this story, it is far from being for children. It is a story of a family in a war-ridden country called Viet Nam. I'm not american so Viet Nam isn't part of the history of my country, but because the US produces movies and other fiction about its war there and exports it to the rest of the world, I did have a picture in my mind about the country and the war. Now this book delivers a view of the people who actually lived and live there, but the fascinating thing is that it isn't written by someone who really grew up there. Instead, it's the viewpoint of a person who only has vague memories about the childhood in Viet Nam. Thi Bui is only 2 years older than me, so she clearly can't remember 1978 when her family made the escape from Viet Nam. The book explains the backstory of her parents, beginning with their childhood and how they met, how they got their children, how the war and the communist terror that followed it, forced them to leave. That is the one side of this novel. The other is the persons they have become because of it, and the way they deal with it, and how their children live with them. A father who is traumatized and often alien, a mother who is very demanding. It's the story of how the author learns to understand why they are how they are. All of this is presented in beautiful, simple, easy to understand pictures that look like images and have very little color. They look like sketches. Personally I loved them. Even on the E Ink tablet they looked terrific. This book is about the difficult sides of live and mankind. War, torture, alienated families, abortion, racism, being a foreigner, having to adapt to a foreign culture, not knowing about your origins and so on. The terror of the communist regime is displayed in few simple sketches but blows away any romantic illusions you may have had about it on the previous pages (because the book DOES show how a small group of land owners and french invaders lived feudal lives while most of the rest had little to nothing). It is a book that is worth reading and I enjoyed it, even though it is very tough to swallow at some points.

Read this for a university English class. One of my favourites that semester!