The Best We Could Do

“Má leaves me but I’m not alone, and a terrifying thought creeps into my head. Family is now something I have created—and not something I was born into.” 

In this quote, Thi describes the anxiety that becoming a mother breeds within her. Torn between seeking comfort from her mother and filling the new role of mother herself, she wrestles with not viewing the responsibility of family-building as merely something she was subjected to while growing up as a child within a family, but a step forward for which she bears the entire adult responsibility. This notion serves as the impetus for the arc of the book, which can be viewed as Thi’s journey to reconcile with her own past to raise her own family with both a respect for her family’s history and hope for its future. 

“My parents escaped Việt Nam on a boat so their children could grow up in freedom. You’d think I could be more grateful. I am now older than my parents were when they made that incredible journey. But I fear that around them, I will always be a child, and they a symbol to me—two sides of a chasm, full of meaning and resentment.”

This quote crystallizes Thi’s experience as the child of immigrants who grew up in America. She feels obligated to demonstrate gratefulness to her parents for the incredible hardship that they endured to secure a better life for herself and her siblings. However, that gratefulness cannot stand in as the explanation for her own identity and understanding of the world, and she feels constrained by the paternalism that accompanies the mandate to be grateful. She wonders how to carve out her own sense of self and adult autonomy while balancing that sense of respect and gratefulness for her parents’ sacrifice. 

“My parents are retired, in good health, and free to do as they please, but also still lonely, aging, and quietly wishing we’d take better care of them. In Việt Nam, they would be considered very old in their seventies. In America, where people their age run marathons or at least live independently, my parents are stuck in limbo between two sets of expectations, and I feel guilty” 

In this quote, Thi shows compassion for the complexity of her parents’ experience. While asserting the anxieties and confusion that characterize her own journey, she also has room to attend to the nuances of the experiences of her parents. They, too, are caught between two worlds and two cultures, even in their old age and after their established resettlement in America. This ongoing duality is a hallmark of many immigrant stories, but it is usually articulated by the first generation of American-raised children, and not by or about their parents. 

“Soon after that trip back to Việt Nam (our first since we escaped in 1978), I began to record our family history, thinking that if I bridged the gap between the past and the present, I could fill the void between my parents and me. And that if I could see Việt Nam as a real place, and not a symbol of something lost, I would see my parents as real people, and learn to love them better.” 

In this quote, Thi gives us some background into the formation of The Best We Could Do. In a reiteration of one of the work’s central themes, she asserts that the life of a family exists as a complex interplay between the past, present, and future of its members. Bui is interested in seeing her parents’ lives and the history of Việt Nam on their own terms—and not only in terms of how they relate to her own sense of self and life. For her, it is through this insight and knowledge that she can see her parents as full, complex people. The journey of discovering her family’s history, in conjunction with understanding the complexity of Việt Nam, which the book documents and parses, represents Thi’s journey to make peace with herself and her parents. 

“That same year, Bố’s grandfather died and I was conceived. On the road to Dĩ An to visit his grave, my parents would pass a large statue of Phât Bà Quan Âm, the Goddess of Mercy. After praying for months to keep me safe, my parents said I was born with her face.” 

This passage, which occurs in the book with an accompanying illustration of Nam, Hắng, and the statue of Phât Bà Quan Âm, demonstrates Thi’s delicate interweaving of the past, present, and future as a central thematic mechanism of the book. Thi’s celebration of the beauty and magic of her parents’ beliefs manifests in this anecdote about Thi being born with the face of the goddess that her parents prayed to for her safety. By choosing to recount it here, Bui foregrounds the singularity of her parents’ journey and its interconnectedness with the culture, country, and spiritual traditions from which they came.  

“How does one recover from the loss of a child? How do the others compare to the memory of the lost one? Have our parents ever looked at us and felt slightly...disappointed? Such high hopes, so much possibility, to fall short. And though my parents took us far away from the site of their grief, certain shadows stretched far, casting a gray stillness over our childhood, hinting at a darkness we did not understand, but could always feel.” 

Here, Thi ruminates about Quyên, her parents’ firstborn child who did not survive past one month. She asserts that, although her lost sister and the additional adversity and anguish that her parents struggled through was rarely discussed, the painful impact of these traumas still exercised a powerful presence during her upbringing. Bui here foregrounds the notion that the life of a family is composed of both the explicit and the unsaid. She parses the tapestry of emotional and psychological complexity that her parents created simply by virtue of blending their own personal histories with those of their children—through the act of creating a family. 

“For my parents, already fully formed in another time and place to which they could never go back, home became the holding pen for the frustrations and the unexorcised demons that had nowhere to go in America’s Finest City.” 

This quote describes the family’s experience in San Diego. Within it, Thi foregrounds the emptiness, hypocrisy, and irony of the city’s slogan: “America’s Finest City.” In San Diego, the Buis struggled financially and psychologically. They struggled with beginning a new life from scratch and with the prejudice and racism of people who stared and even once spit in Nam’s face. The ugliness and complexity of their initial experience in America is papered over by an empty tourism slogan that belies no actual insight nor truth about what life for the Buis was like in that city. 

 “Tâm developed the habit of hiding in the closet for hours—holding his bowel movements in, trying not to mess his pants. I, conversely, became obsessed with the supernatural. I read and reread Bố’s books and paraphernalia, studying the pictures, until I had memorized every disturbing detail. And so we spent the days.” 

In this quote, Thi highlights the ill effects of her and Tâm’s isolation with their father as young children. Stuck with a man ill-equipped to attend to both their practical and emotional needs, the two siblings developed their own coping mechanisms. The passage is markedly characterized by a matter-of-fact, rather than inflamed, tone: reflecting Thi’s desire to understand the pain of her own childhood not on vengeful terms toward her parents, but with compassion. She understands that her childhood experiences were related to her own parents’ childhood experiences, and to the frailties they accumulated through their own experiences of hardship and trauma. Thi’s tone, which refuses to condemn her father, reflects her compassion for him, despite her own suffering. 

“Drifting off to sleep, I imagined the lanes of car lights as two rivers—one going to heaven, ours to hell. In my sleep, I dreamt of how terrible it would be to not find my way home.” 

Here, Thi highlights the powerful imagination that characterized her interior life as a child. She also foregrounds the sense of pain and upheaval that influenced her childhood flights of fancy and pushed them toward dark places. The terror here articulated—that of becoming lost—also hearkens to the family’s refugee history, to the terror and trauma of being uprooted and cast into an unknown world fraught with mortal danger. The passage therefore highlights how Thi sensed and struggled to reconcile the complexity and trauma of her family’s refugee experience, even as a child. Although she was too young to sense and face all the trauma that her parents experienced, as well as that which she herself experienced at her young age, her dreams and psyche are marked, as evidenced by the dark turn of her imaginings. 

“If I could close my eyes, I could sleep. And if I could sleep, I could dream. Though my world was small, I would sometimes dream of being free in it. This was my favorite dream.” 

This quote comes at the end of a chapter in which Thi describes her family’s experience settling into their new life in San Diego. For Thi, this time was characterized by loneliness, confusion, fear, isolation, and constraint. Here, she articulates a dream essentially about belonging—being free within one’s own world means feeling nurtured, confident, and strong. Due to the trauma of war and displacement, as well as the limited emotional capacities of her parents, Thi did not feel these things at this point in her life. On Pages 89-90, the illustrations of Thi as a child, swimming through her dream, also visually foreshadow the end of the book, which depicts Thi’s son swimming in a similar visual manner. 

“To understand how my father became the way he was, I had to learn what happened to him as a little boy. It took a long time to learn the right questions to ask. When I did, the stories poured forth with no beginning or end.” 

Here, Thi speaks about her relationship with her father, as well as his general character. A bit of a gender dynamic also comes into play here, with her father being a bit more emotionally remote and reserved than her mother. Nam’s emotional absence in the family is a repeating element of the text. So, too, is what Thi here articulates: her respectful, compassionate, and persistent endeavor to get her parents to open up with her and tell her their stories—so that she may gain a better understanding and appreciation of each of them as full people. 

“I had never, before researching the background of my father’s stories, imagined that these horrible events were connected to my family history, or that they ushered in a brief but hopeful moment in Việt Nam’s history.” 

In this quote, Thi recounts how the American atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 affected both Việt Nam’s history at large and her own father’s life. This quote demonstrates the power and depth of Thi’s journey discovering both her own family’s history and the way that the story of her family’s life fits in with the broader contexts of war and geopolitical conflict. However, the third-person objectivity of the facts of war, while they are inserted to fill the narrative out and provide necessary background information, are not at all the focus of the narrative. The focus is Thi’s quest for the intimate details of her parents’ lives, and ultimately, the historical details enrich her understanding of her parents’ lives, not the other way around.  

“Writing about my mother is harder for me—maybe because my image of her is too tied up with my opinion of myself.”

Here, Thi names the key difference between her relationship with her mother and her relationship with her father: writing about her mother feels more personal to her. Thi’s feelings here seem to intertwine with the gender that she shares with her mother—an issue foregrounded by the bookending narrative device of Thi’s son’s birth. The book’s narrative begins and ends with Thi giving birth to her son as her mother is present but cannot bear to be present at all times. Thi’s child’s birth brings her both closer to and further away from her mother as she wrestles with doing exactly what her mother did: giving birth to a child and therefore starting a family of her own. She feels inadequate in the shadow of her strong, capable, and once-glamorous mother, and unsure if she can live up to her. This dynamic also foregrounds the idea of the life of a family being both cyclical and progressional: Thi cannot help but form her own identity from the scaffolding provided by her mother, but she’s of course aware of her own personhood separate from her mother as well.  

“I went to see the old house with my family in 2001, the time that Bố refused to go...We each had our own reaction to this homecoming: Lan, already scouting ahead...Má and Bích, the most excited...Me and Tâm, documenting in lieu of remembering.” 

This quote describes a family trip back to Việt Nam, without Nam. It is accompanied by illustrations of each named family member. In it, Thi crystallizes her own personality as well as those of her family members in one condensed visual and textual moment. The expression on each character’s face belies what their accompanying caption reveals. Through this, Thi communicates a depth of sensitivity and insight into herself and her family members: an attendance to the ways that the tiniest details can speak volumes about each of their characters. It is this compassionate sensitivity that Thi uses throughout the narrative as she endeavors to portray her family and its members in all their complexity and humanity. 

“George Syvertsen reports […] This neighborhood is called Bàn Cớ, or the chessboard, because of the maze of alleys and passageways. Its residents are mostly poor working people, and its slums are a refuge for Sài Gòn’s hoodlums and criminal element. A Southeast Asian version of the Lower East Side or the Algerian Casbah.” 

In this quote, Thi quotes archival news footage of her former neighborhood. The quotation provides a cruel, caricaturized image of herself, her family, and her former community. It dehumanizes the neighborhood’s inhabitants by reducing them to “hoodlums and criminal elements”—their homes and neighborhood to a “slum.” The purpose of Thi’s quotation is to reveal and fight back against the American mainstream narrative of the Vietnam War, which reduces the full and complex human lives of Vietnamese people to crude and prejudiced caricature. Through the act of writing this book, Thi declares her and her family’s humanity—over and above the oversimplifying, narrow, and nationalistic American histrionics about the war. 

“Revisiting this game of war and strategy, I think about how none of the Vietnamese people in that video have a name or a voice. My grandparents and my parents, my sisters, and me—we weren’t any of the pieces on the chessboard. We were more like ants, scrambling out of the way of giants, getting just far enough from danger to resume the business of living.” 

Here, Thi digs deeper into her problems with the way that her own history, the history of her family, and the history of Vietnamese people at large, were represented by mainstream American journalism at the time of the Vietnam War. She says that this coverage portrayed her family and those like them as voiceless, inconsequential, and therefore dehumanized. Her reference to the chessboard—a perennial symbol of the strategy of war—reveals Thi’s feeling that the discussion of such war strategies and grand narratives in relation to the Vietnam War obscures the intricacies of the human lives involved. She wants to separate the real, lived experiences of her parents from the media noise that papers over and ignores them.  

“I understand why it was easier for her to not tell me these things directly, and I did want to know. But it still wasn’t easy for me to swallow that my mother had been at her happiest without us.” 

In this passage, Hắng has just finished telling Travis, Thi’s husband, that her time at the Lycée Yersin during her girlhood was the best time of her life. Thi has already discovered that her mother has a looser tongue with Travis than she does with her, but this honest insight does sting Thi. It also sets a central premise of the narrative: Thi’s determination to see and understand her parents as full people, not just in relation to how their lives influenced or created her own. Thi wants to hear these details, even if they sting her personally, because they serve her end of gaining an understanding of her mother as a full person. 

“The contradiction in my father’s stories troubled me for a long time. But so did the oversimplifications and stereotypes in American versions of the Vietnam War.” 

Here, Thi concisely names the obstacles that she faces while piecing together her family history. On the one hand, she contends with the ambiguity and imperfection of her father’s recollections, as well as her own sensitivities within her relationship with him. In a parallel sense, she also struggles with the ambiguity, prejudice, and imperfection of American media and historical documentation of the war, which reduces Vietnamese people to disrespectful and incomplete caricatures (displayed by the illustrations on this page as well). To reach the truth—human, emotional, historical, and contextual—Thi must dig deeper than the face value of both of these ambiguities. 

“‘Saigon Execution’ is credited with turning popular opinion in America against the war. I think a lot of Americans forget that for the Vietnamese, the war continued, whether America was involved or not. For my parents, there was a rocket that barely missed their house and killed a neighbor, best friends and students killed in combat, frequent periods of separation, the constant stress of money, the baby that died in the womb, and then my arrival, three months before South Việt Nam lost the war.” 

Here, Thi uses another prominent visual symbol of the war—the photograph now known as “Saigon Execution”— to subvert the American mainstream narrative about the war. She points out the removal and shallowness of an American public that can wash its hands of the Vietnam War, while staying ignorant to the Vietnamese people and the lives that they must live beyond and after such spectacles make their way through the American consciousness. For Americans, the carnage of the Vietnam War was something to be gawked at and outrage about from afar—something that could be turned off with the switch of a button or the change of the news cycle. For people like Thi, it was a lived reality. 

“There is no single story of that day, April 30, 1975. In Việt Nam today, among the victors, it is called Liberation Day. Overseas, among expats like my parents, it is remembered as The Day We Lost Our Country.”

 This page presents three panels. One panel depicts the victors, who view April 30, 1975 as Liberation Day. They celebrate on a tank engine. The panel next to this one depicts three Vietnamese expats with downcast eyes, a picture of Vietnam emblazoning the front of each of their shirts. The panel beneath these two, whose caption reads, “This is the image that most people know of the fall of Sài Gòn,” shows an illustration of the famous photograph of Vietnamese refugees being loaded into American helicopters. Although simple, this visual triad crystallizes the complexity of the Vietnam War. Although American media coverage posits its narrative as the authoritative one, Thi here advocates for herself and for the truth of the country: that the personal and political histories of Vietnam and the Vietnamese people are multifaceted and passionate. She resists dominant narratives that reduce herself and those like her to mere victims clamoring to be rescued by Americans, and instead asserts that there is no “single story” that can encompass the war’s complexity, as experienced by Vietnamese people.

“The American version of this story is one of South Vietnamese cowardice, corruption, and ineptitude: South Vietnamese soldiers abandoning their uniforms in the street, Americans crying at their wasted efforts to save a country not worth saving. But Communist forces entered Sài Gòn without a fight, and no blood was shed. Perhaps Dương Văn Minh’s surrender saved my life.”

Here, Thi contrasts her direct, lived experience of the fall of Sài Gòn against the American narrative, which persists in casting the South Vietnamese people as dishonorable, and their country as worthless. She credits Dương Văn Minh’s surrender with saving her life and the South Vietnamese leader as a person with an actual strategy for sparing life—rather than the bumbling, inept, and cowardly image of the man who persists within the dominant American narrative. Thi’s concise portrayal of the tension between her own lived experience and the machinations of American war propaganda asserts her own humanity—over and above the normative line that either erases her or casts people like her as an anonymous mass prop.

“The struggle to bring a life into the world is rewarded by that cry. It is a single-minded effort, uncluttered and clear in its objective. What follows afterward—that is, the rest of the child’s life—is another story.”

Here, Thi offers an insight about childbirth, parenting, and family that is just as much about the birth of her own son as it is about her mother giving birth to her. She inserts this panel, complete with an illustration of a baby, right after depicting a conversation that she had with her mother about bearing the pain of childbirth. The fact that this quote equally applies to both herself, her son, and her mother foregrounds the idea of the life of a family proceeding in both cycles and forward motion. Thi and her mother now share a common struggle: that of bringing a new life into the world. For Thi, that “other story” of a birthed baby’s life is the one that she is living now, as a child of her mother who has grown into a life of her own. That “other story” is also the story of her son’s life—yet to be told. This fusion of a common or universal experience with an understanding of the potential for growth and progression is a key thematic duality.

“At least I no longer feel the need to reclaim a homeland. I understand enough of Việt Nam’s history to know that the ground beneath my parents’ feet had always been shifting, so that by the time I was born, Việt Nam was not my country at all. I was only a small part of it.”

Here, Thi reveals a key aspect of her journey with her personal and family history. At the outset of her quest, she felt that there was a solid, static “homeland” to be reclaimed. However, her conversations and research has helped her understand that her parents did not experience Việt Nam as a solid, stable homeland themselves. The tumult and upheaval that characterized the country and, therefore, her parent’s lives, precluded the kind of relationship with a home country that Thi previously believed herself and her family to have lost. She has great respect for the country and its people, while simultaneously seeing herself and the country’s history with clearer eyes.