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. Bố refuses to take a minimum wage job, so he stays at home while Má works. In Chapter Three, Bui looks back to her childhood, when her family has difficulty coping with the American way of life. 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. 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. 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 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. 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.

Bui reflects on “FAMILY,” which “is now something created” rather than “just something was born into.” 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. She spends the night with her son, but she is more confused than overjoyed. 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.

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. 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.īui’s first chapter begins in 2005, with her giving birth in New York City. 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.

Graphic novel the best we could do