The Best We Could Do
Summary: The Best We Could Do, the debut graphic novel memoir by Thi Bui, is an intimate look at one family's journey from their war-torn home in Vietnam to their new lives in America. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui's story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent--the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through
From the Author's Website:
Thi Bui was born in Vietnam and came to the United States in 1978 as part of the "boat people" wave of refugees fleeing Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017) has been selected for an American Book Award, a Common Book for UCLA and other colleges and universities, an all-city read by Seattle and San Francisco public libraries, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, and an Eisner Award finalist in reality-based comics. It made over thirty best of 2017 book lists, including Bill Gates' top five picks. She illustrated the picture book, A Different Pond, written by the poet Bao Phi (Capstone, 2017), for which she won a Caldecott Honor. With her son, Hien, she co-illustrated the children’s book, Chicken of the Sea (McSweeney’s, 2019), written by Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen and his son, Ellison. Her short comics can be found online at The Nib, PEN America, and BOOM California. She is currently researching and drawing a work of graphic nonfiction about immigrant detention and deportation, to be published by One World, Random House.
Further Reading (Graphic Novels)
Further Reading
2021 Discussion Questions
From "Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do: A Teaching Guide" by the UO Common Reading Program of the University of Oregon. This section provides potential questions for class discussions or for approaches to student/faculty research and classroom engagement with the book.
Refugees, Resettlement, Race: How does the story of Thi Bui’s family’s survival from poverty, war, escape, and resettlement in the U.S. inform our understanding of the refugee experience in the United States. How does this narrative challenge the model minority myth that assumes Asian Americans have attained social and economic success and do not experience racism?
Gender and Family Dynamics: The Best We Could Do begins with Thi Bui giving birth. Throughout the graphic novel, gender and family dynamics are ever present with tensions between spouses, gendered expectations for girls and women, and at times gender based violence. How does Thi Bui’s representation of gender, family, class, and masculinity impact the larger narrative, and how do we as readers reconcile these representations?
War, Nation, Politics: The trauma of war and politics shapes Thi Bui’s connection to Viet Nam as her homeland. Why did many Vietnamese people support the communist revolution but many others were against it? What were the driving forces throughout the centuries of conflict, and how does nationhood and independence for Viet Nam shape the ideals and hopes for the Vietnamese people and what are the gaps from the realities of war and trauma that we see unfold? How did war and revolution affect individual Vietnamese and their relationships with their loved ones?
Genre in Asian American Literature: What genre would you classify this book as and why? What does it mean to be Asian American, according to this book? To what extent should we read this book as representative as opposed to singular and why? Why does the narrator suggest that the defining inheritance of her family history is a “Refugee Reflex” (305) rather than any specific aspect of Vietnamese culture? Furthermore, why then does she go on to realize, upon reflection and as explained in the preface, that “Refugee Reflex” is an inadequate title and that The Best We Could Do better captured her concerns?
Viet Thanh Nguyen, also a diasporic Vietnamese American writer who arrived as a refugee as a young child, has written in several public fora about the difference between “refugee” and “immigrant” literature: for Nguyen, refugees do not have a choice for the most part, and threaten the integrity of the host nation in a way that immigrants (who presumably make a choice to migrate, make efforts towards assimilation, and may return to their place of origin should they so choose) do not. Do you agree with Nguyen’s distinction? How would you read The Best We Could Do along the lines Nguyen suggests?
Stereotypes and the Politics of Representation / Form and Content: What is the relationship between form and content in this book? Think about how racial/national/gender difference is visually depicted in this book? How do the text and images work together? What kind of argument is this text making? What is its visual rhetoric?
Graphic Novel and Visual Aesthetics: Why do you think Bui choose the graphic novel to tell her story? In what ways is the graphic novel well-suited for a non-linear narrative? How do the sequential images of the graphic novel develop individual storylines, present complex stories and diverse perspectives?
Pronunciation Guide
PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
This list includes some French words and Malaysian places, names, as pronounced by the Vietnamese characters in the book.
Additional Activities
Activities from "Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do: A Teaching Guide" by the UO Common Reading Program of the University of Oregon.
Activity A: Visually analyze a single panel. Discuss how the artist's rendering help us identify and empathize with specific characters; how does it specify place or evoke an emotion? Visually analyze the composition of an entire page layout. Discuss the design elements and the visual transition from panel to panel; what aesthetics decisions were made? How does it contextualize the information being presented in the narrative? Discuss the foreground/background or figure/ground visual or interior/exterior 13 relationship and transition. How does it shape the character’s narrative and identity, and our understanding of their stories? Note: the comic drawing style could be discussed in comparison/contrast to an observational or representational drawing, or compare/contrast the sequential art form to moving images in video and film.
Activity B: Remove words from one page/section/chapter of The Best We Could Do (the instructor could choose a part that best resonates with their thematic concerns). Fill in the blanks with your own words, given what you understand of the plot thus far: what have your words added? What has been lost in removing the narrator’s/characters’/other words and replacing them with your own? How does the absence of text change the quality of your attention to the images and other formal elements of the comic?
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