The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

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 could not understand but could always feel.

We open in a hospital. Thi, the protagonist and author, is having her first child. Her mother, Má, has traveled across the country to be there for her first grandchild’s birth but can’t bear to stay in the room. Her father, Bố, is nowhere to be found, nor are any of her three siblings. A doctor is assisting with the birth, but she’s brusque and implacable. Her husband, Travis, is nearby, but Thi is--or at least feels--alone.

The Best We Can Do is, at heart, is about family--the way our parents, grandparents, and siblings shape us, either by their direct action or, more often and persistently, by the ways their actions shaped others. But it’s more than that too. It’s beautiful to look at, with clean but energetic linework counterbalanced by earthy pastel watercolors varying in hue and presence as the emotional beats of the story ebb and flow.

Although the story always comes back around to Thi, a first generation Vietnamese immigrant who came over on a boat, as a child, during the Vietnam War, the lion’s share of the narrative is given to her parents, Bố and Má, tracing their lives through childhood, college, marriage, exile, and eventually separation. Má, bookish and ambitious, comes from wealth; Bố, street smart and booksmart, grows up beneath a piece of cardboard nailed between two buildings. They meet at college as the war is beginning. Má, in spite of earlier proclamations that she wouldn’t marry, does so anyway, less for love than because she assumes she doesn’t have long to live with the county crumbling around her. Bố, on the other hand, falls for Má right away, but finds himself mostly unable to connect with Má or, for that matter, anyone else. At the beginning of the story, they’re separated and what happened in the intervening years becomes the story, as Thi slowly draws their story out so it can be told.

The middle section, where Má and Bố watch as their lives and their country are ripped apart by the Vietcong and, it must be said, the Americans who treat them scarcely better and tell the story of the war in ways that incense Bố. In one of the most memorable scenes, Bố defends the general from the famous photo, you know the one, taken just before a VC gets his brains blown out. We also learn that the general, after the war, came to the US and spent his last years working at a pizza parlor. And these sorts of details, the straggling conclusions of lives ripped to shreds by circumstances beyond their control, are the controlling throughline.

Yes, Thi builds a good life, but she’s haunted by the sense of otherness she feels, by the ugliness she sees in the American landscape, and, more ominously, the specter of becoming like her parents, of breaking her beautiful baby the way she was broken. The other side of the coin, though, is water--the water coming through Bố’s childhood roof, the lake where Thi learns to swim, the river that carried the “boat people”, the rain when they arrive on the peaceful beach--with its cool implacability, bringing (and taking) with it both the good and the bad. When Má’s third child, Queyen (River in Vietnamese), dies soon after being born, it feels like a repudiation of water as cleansing, lifegiving. But on the final page, the image is redeemed (or maybe just shaded) with a full page spread of Thi’s child, at ten, swimming joyously, unstoppable, as Thi narrates:

What has worried me since having my own child was whether I would pass along some gene for sorrow or unintentionally inflict damage I could never undo. But when I look at my son, I don’t see war and loss or even Travis and me. I see a new life, bound with mine quite by coincidence, and I think maybe he can be free.