40 pages • 1 hour read
Thi BuiThe Best We Could Do
Nonfiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Family Life Cycle
The Best We Could Do begins and ends with a depiction of Thi giving birth to her son. This choice taps into a universal understanding of birth as the marker of the start of a new life cycle. Simultaneously, though, this recurring plot element creates a deep, intimate sense of the singularity of Thi and her family’s experience. Bui therefore invokes a shared human experience of the life cycle while telling us that she also understands this shared cycle as something deeply personal, intimate, and unique. For example, while birth as the initiation of a life cycle can be viewed as something of a universal, Thi’s mother’s experience of giving birth to Tam at a refugee camp is not.
By attending to both the macro-level and the micro-level elements of the repeating cycle of life, Bui forwards the notion that, while members of distinct generations within a family share a bond based on a common human experience, they are also bound to each other through legacies of both trauma and joy that unfold over generations. The older generations get to see their progeny struggle with certain universals of the human experience while also grappling with their unique temporal, contextual, political, societal, and even geographical territories that necessitate forward motion and progress. For Bui, the life of a family contains both the beauty and grace of repeating cycles and the potentiality of progressive forward movement.
The Spoken and the Unspoken
As Thi struggles with reconciling herself with her family’s history in general as well as the personal histories of her mother and father, there are many points at which she asserts that she sensed and knew things as a child that were never spoken aloud. Her relationship with her father is relevant for this theme, as Thi and her siblings did not go to their father for the nurturing and organization that their mother would provide more reliably. Thi vividly remembers feeling that, although it was never discussed, the trauma resulting from her father’s traumatic childhood influenced her own childhood.
In other words, as a child, she sensed aspects of her father’s personal history that were transmitted to her by virtue of simply being born to her father and living within a family unit with him. Through these facts, Bui communicates that the life of a family is composed of both the spoken and the unspoken. Much of the narrative depicts Thi asking her parents to make things plainer and more explicit to her, but she never relies solely upon these factual or empirical insights to sum up her understanding. The emotional and psychological tapestry woven by the unsaid is just as important in Bui’s understanding of herself and of her parents.
The Inadequate American Narrative About the Vietnam War
At many points within the narrative, Thi contradicts and resists mainstream American narratives about both the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people at large. She does this to reclaim her own history and assert her experience as an authentic human one—not mere caricature. She does the same for the lives and experiences of her family members, especially her mother and father. These assertions are political statements and ideas that ground the work’s exploration of identity. Injecting her narrative with recurring statements that offer a more truthful, lived account of life in Vietnam during the war, over and above the American propaganda, helps Thi as a narrator to stake out a claim for her own identity. Coexistent with her emotional, psychological, and historical engagement with her own identity is this political consciousness. Each of these streams feeds into an intricate and complex exploration of her multifaceted identity. Her insistence upon her own voice subverts a dominant, jingoistic American narrative that prefers her silence so that it may speak over her about the history and character of the country from which she came.
