The Best We Could Do

This chapter opens on Berkeley, California, in the year 2015. Thi tells us that the birth of her son has led to “more responsibilities, like a steady job and a mortgage” (23). She then takes us back to San Diego, 1999. At that time, she was a young woman moving to New York with her boyfriend and her dreams of becoming an artist. Thi’s mother did not put up the resistance to Thi living with a man prior to marriage that Thi thought she would. Thi’s mother had trouble accepting Thi’s older sister Lan’s decision to move in with her then-boyfriend a few years earlier. Thi’s other older sister Bích ran away from home when their mother opposed her relationship with her boyfriend in 1987. This prompted her mother to take an entire bottle of pills and retire to bed, while her father announced that Bích was dead to the family. The family then avoided talking about this incident—to the point where Thi’s mother forgot that Thi was even there. Thi surprises herself with her own anger about this oversight.

Thi then names everyone in her family by name: her two older sisters Lan and Bích, as well as two sisters enclosed in shadows, Quyên and Thảo, and her younger brother Tâm. She states, “I have figured out, more or less, how to raise my little family […] but it’s being both a parent and a child without acting like a child, that eludes me” (29). A panel shows Thi telling her young son and husband, “We’re such ASSHOLES! We’re the lame second generation,” while her son tells her that she has said a bad word (29). Thi states that her parents fled from Việt Nam on a boat in order to ensure freedom for their children, and reflects that she now finds herself older than her parents were when they completed their epic journey: “But [she fears] that around them, [she] will always be a child...and they a symbol to [her]—two sides of a chasm, full of meaning and resentment” (30).

Thi says that, in 2006, she and Travis left their full life in New York in order to raise their son in California close to family. However, she’s come to realize that “proximity and closeness are not the same” (31). Although each of her siblings and their spouses live within blocks, her mother lives in her backyard home, and her father at nearby senior apartments, her parents are “also still lonely, aging, and quietly wishing we’d take better care of them” (33). She observes that her parents are caught between Vietnamese social conventions, which would regard them as elderly in their seventies, and American norms, “where people their age run marathons or at least live independently” (33). This racks Thi with guilt. She recalls that her own staid interactions with her grandparents taught her nothing about how to have an intimate relationship with her parents.

Although Thi’s father always maintained that he no longer had parents, Thi learned that her paternal grandfather was alive in Việt Nam when she was in her twenties. Although she and her siblings traveled to Việt Nam to meet her paternal grandfather and their extended family, her father refused to join them. He persisted in his distance until his father eventually died. Soon after that, Thi took it upon herself to document her family’s history—“thinking that if [she] bridged the gap between the past and the present, [she] could fill the void between [her] parents and [herself]. And that if [she] could see Việt Nam as a real place, and not a symbol of something lost, [she] would see her parents as real people, and learn to love them better” (36). This page has illustrations of an adult Thi and an unidentified Vietnamese young person with the outline of Vietnam emblazoned on their back in black. The page’s background also shows softly-rendered images in red watercolor: the outline of Việt Nam and large ocean waves. The visual trope of an outline of Việt Nam rendered in soft red watercolor recurs throughout the narrative.

Thi recalls the way that she peppered her parents with unceasing questions about their home country and the war that ripped it apart. Her mother, perennially practical, would “rather [that they] laughed more or went shopping together,” but she still “humors [Thi] with stories” (37). Hắng does not often say “I love you” to Thi: she buys presents and cooks instead. Thi herself does not say the words very much either, and is troubled by the loneliness that characterizes her relationship with her mother. On a two-page spread that shows a wind-blown Thi looking out into a body of water, and a person on a boat struggling through turbulent waves on the page opposite, Thi narrates: “We live so close to each other and yet feel so far apart. I keep looking toward the past, tracing our journey in reverse, over the ocean, through the war, seeking an origin story that will set everything right” (39-41).

The narrative then switches to recalling Tâm’s birth. He was born in 1978, in a UN refugee camp in Malaysia. Hắng’s brother, Hải, cobbled together a hammock while her father leads a cadre of helpers out of the camp with a flashlight. Her mother gave birth at the midwife’s home. Thi’s older sister Thảo was stillborn in Sài Gòn in 1974, and Thi was born in the same city in 1975—the same year that her father’s grandfather died. Bích was born in Sài Gòn in January 1968, two weeks before the Tết Offensive. Thi writes, “My family huddled by the radio at Má’s while the fighting raged on outside” (49). During Lan’s 1966 birth in the Mekong Delta, Hắng was a teacher in a rural territory. It was difficult for her to get to the hospital, as communist barricades were numerous along the roads to the city. Thi’s mother was just 22 at the time, and had already lost her first child at 21.

Quyên was born in Sài Gòn in 1965, a “baby girl [who] lit up the skies with her smile” (52). Thi writes, “Some people in Việt Nam say you shouldn’t give a baby a beautiful name or jealous spirits will come and take the baby away. My parents defiantly gave their firstborn a name that sounded like and meant “GREAT RIVER”—Giang Quyên” (53). Quyên’s health faltered when she was one month old. The doctor instructed Thi’s parents to feed Quyên carrot juice because she could not digest the baby formula. However, her health never fully improved and she soon died. Thi remarks that it’s possible her mother never stopped asking herself why, or if she could have done something different for Quyên.

Thi wonders how her parents reconciled the loss of their firstborn, and if they ever felt disappointed by their surviving children: “And though my parents took us far away from the site of their grief,” she writes, “certain shadows stretched far, casting a gray stillness over our childhood, hinting at a darkness we did not understand, but could always feel” (58-60).