The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir
Thi Bui details her family’s journey from Vietnam to the United States at the end of the Vietnam War through a powerfully illustrated graphic novel. Vivid textures and lush scenes are poetically depicted through black pen and ink drawings that layer atop washes of warm rust-colored tones. Bui’s use of the warm washes varies from heavy and deeply saturated to lighter cloudlike textures on a page, challenging the reader’s perception of each scene’s emotion. Bui’s approach to composition brings the reader along on her family’s journey. The number of frames per page ranges throughout the book from nine equally sized rectangular boxes to not just a full page, but one luxurious double page image that soothes us into taking breathing in the moment just as a character might. Bui’s use of scale in this manner also plays with the reader’s sense of levity within the heaviness that permeates a story that is ultimately about a family’s at times desperate survival.
The text of The Best We Could Do presents readers with the often uncomfortable interactions of the Bui family as they navigate a new culture while trying to sustain their family dynamics. Throughout the book, readers are carried to different time periods in the past through the voices of each family member’s recollections of the past. The book begins by jolting readers into a New York City hospital room, where Bui is enduring an agonizingly long labor with her son. Her uncomfortable and frustrating hospital stay gives way to an abrupt shift ahead to several years later in Berkeley, California where her family is remembering events that shaped their early years in the United States. As recalling builds for the family, the reader is taken back to Vietnam to Bui’s parent’s, Bố and Má’s, childhood. The author’s voice is heard throughout the book as Bui’s narrations jump back and forth from her recollections of events to reconstructed moments she’s been told about from before she was born. Bui invites readers to step back as she does at times and listen to the conversations of family members from the third person. Occasionally Bui shifts the perspective again with examples of dialog that slips into the second person. Bui supports readers’ understanding of the Vietnam War throughout the memoir by explaining historical events in separate frames. Almost totally solid black backgrounds with white text laid on top fill these frames. These stand-alone frames do not necessarily interrupt the family dialog, rather they add context to the conversations they share a page with.
Through this unit students will focus their reading on the family’s departure from Vietnam and their experiences rebuilding their lives in the United States in the last quarter of the book (pages 215-329). We will begin our reading as Bố and Má are making the difficult decision to leave Vietnam. The reader is instantly brought into the tension of the decision to begin the family’s departure preparations by boat without letting on to others that they are in fact leaving Vietnam for good. Bố and Má’s words to each other completely fill multiple round, white speech bubbles that collect and sometimes overwhelm the individual frames on the page. These frames contain a great deal of text and convey the anxiety that Bố and Má must feel at this desperate moment, as each text bubble seems to come from several different directions at the same time. For readers who learned to read from left to right, this is not quite as disorienting, but some of my students, who are learning to reading in this linear direction, may need some guidance.
I believe that all readers, and in particular my students will identify with the fear and anguish Má feels as she worries that the books they own and clothes they wear may be scrutinized by communist soldiers at any moment as capitalist propaganda. It is at this moment that the things the Bui family has filled their home with are no longer simply things. They have become liabilities because they represent something greater: independent thinking. Má assuages her own fears at this point in the narrative as she calls out to her older daughters to read as many books as they can now before they all “get burned”.
Upon reading about the Bui family’s decision to leave Vietnam I plan to facilitate a discussion and writing exercise with students about when they or their family made the decision to leave their home country. Some students may have been involved in the conversation to leave, while others may have been just been told and possibly abruptly that they were leaving the places they called home. Whatever events led to my students’ departures, the act of preparing to leave is a significant memory to honor and allow space for reflection through writing and drawing or painting within the private pages of sketchbooks.
As we return to the reading the text during a different lesson, we are invited along as the Bui family manages to get themselves on a departing boat that suddenly has no captain. During this ordeal, Bố becomes less of a fragile character as he’s been previously described as he heroically pilots the boat through international waters and safely to Malaysia--although not without being thrown off the boat and separated from his family by the ocean’s menacing current. He is weakened by this journey, physically and psychologically, and this reaffirms Má’s role as the parent who makes things happen for not just the Bui family, but for other refugees trying to find their way as well. Má makes sure that the family is registered for the proper documentation, has food to eat, and a safe place to sleep. She speaks more English than most of the other refugees and is called upon to help translate, often leaving open the possibility of her own family’s demise. The family is separated a few times, but eventually they are reunited and join Má’s sister’s family in Hammond, Indiana.
While reading about the family’s journey to the United States, I anticipate that my students will reflect upon their own travels, many of which were very traumatic. Some of my students traveled with their families through several other countries to arrive in the United States. Other students began their journeys with their parents and were separated, leaving them orphans in a new and strange country, while several of my students began their travels alone or with other children whose journeys took them across a dangerous network of secret pathways. As with the Bui family, each of my students experienced the feeling of not knowing what would happen to them next.
Taking inspiration from Phoebe Gloeckner’s lesson “Writing About Painful Things” in Don’t Forget to Write: 50 Enthralling and Effective Writing Lessons Ages 11 and Up by 826 National, I plan to invite my students to take some meaningful time to write, draw, or paint about their crossing into the United States. Gloeckner acknowledges that “writing is hard” and because it is hard “it is worth it”. She goes on to inspire young writers in a powerful way that I believe will speak to my students”
Here’s why it’s worth it: writing is about love. It really is. It’s about loving life, and wanting to preserve it, cling to it, understand it. You want to distill experience, and make it like the earth makes diamonds from coal: you want to compress it until it’s this moment in life that people can understand. Not necessarily understand you –just understand something. When my work is done it’s not me. If it has any life at all, it’s because of people who read it. Writing is about love, and feeling happy to be alive, but being aware all the time of life’s fragility and impermanence.8
The components of Gloeckner’s lesson are written more like advice to writers rather than how to write about pain. She instills the value of giving some distance between one’s self and one’s writing, and absolves any writer of feeling that they always have to tell the truth, instead giving acceptance to changing a story. Perhaps the piece of guidance she offers that may be the most influential to my students is that even in the most painful stories, not everything has to be negative or sad.
In the final portion of the book we will read we find the Bui family out-migrating as Bố and Má are busy taking night classes, the older girls begin attending school. Despite their best efforts, the family stands out as the newcomers they are when the children are teased by their cousins for dressing and eating like “refugees”. Life in the Midwest is difficult for the family to adjust to. The allure of the first snowy days of winter fade as the family is plagued by recurring bouts with pneumonia and a declaration is made that it’s time “for the family to make their own way” and move to San Diego, California.
Life in San Diego is much different for the Bui Family. They quickly find an apartment of their own, and begin to fill that home with things that represent their “America” –a Christmas tree, a television, and numerous toys. Má is working many hours at a low paying job and while the older girls are in school Bui and her younger brother are at home and stay indoors with Bố much of the time. During these early days in California it becomes clear to the reader through Bui’s childhood recollections that while Má is thriving at night school and advancing in her career, Bố is challenged by his new surroundings and there are hints that he is haunted by the past. In one frame both of Thi’s parents are seen giving advice. The caption reads, “We learned what was important to survive.” Each parent is seen with a similar look of concern on their face, yet their lesson for survival was drastically different. Má’s speech bubble cheerfully reads, “ Always be the best in your class!” while Bố’s cautions in slightly larger and bolder letters, “Lock the door!” The Bui’s life in America is now about blending the new with the old, not only in the things that fill their apartment, but in the words and values that Bui’s parents instill in her and her siblings.
The Bui family’s “most important possession” is a brown file folder. In it are birth certificates, green cards, and social security cards. As each child entered school they received a brown folder of their own to hold report cards, certificates, and class pictures. One evening when Bui is fourteen years old, the family is startled by a commotion outside of their apartment and the words “GET THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS!” This is one of the few times Bui uses all capital letters, so the reader knows that something terrible is about to happen and that the family is in great danger. Bui explains that a “normal response” would be to see what was happening, but her family’s was to immediately lock the door and rush to the bedroom to hide. However, a loud booming sound alerts them to a fire outside and using a few small frames, Bui depicts her family hastily escaping down the stairs of their second floor apartment clutching their essential brown file folder. The next page is filled with just two frames divided in half by a horizon of waves and a small folded paper boat adrift between them. The top image is filled with firefighters hosing down what is presumably the outside of family’s charred apartment building alongside paramedics loading a patient strapped to gurney into a waiting ambulance. The lower image is of an empty, but smoke filled bedroom inside the apartment. The text that cascades down on this page uniting the two opposite frames in addition to the frames on the preceding page detailing the family’s escape are not incased in caption boxes as most narration throughout the book is; rather these words are floating within roughly wiped away negative spaces on the page, as if Bui herself had to wipe the smoke and soot from the fire away to tell us this part of her family’s journey. The words Bui chooses to tell the story of this night are perhaps universal to many immigrants whose stories of survival have no real permanent end.
This is the night I learned what my parents had been preparing me for my whole life. This–not any particular piece of my Vietnamese culture–is my inheritance: the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to RUN when the shit hits the fan. My Refugee Reflex.9
This realization is powerful and leaves the reader holding their breath for a moment, but this feeling is immediately tempered when we turn the page to see the Bui family returning to their smoke-filled home, discovering that everything inside their apartment is just as they left it. Safe inside, we see can see the family looking weary as the file folder of documents is put away and everyone goes to sleep. This moment, when everything that was once thrown up in the air is now safely back in its place may seem anticlimactic, but then we as readers realize that the “refugee reflex” as Bui calls it is cyclical. It will be activated again, and for her and her family everything will be thrown up in the air again, and again, and again.
This notion of a “refugee reflex” or a trigger is a mighty driving force within many of my students. It is what causes them to halt when the rest of the world urges them to keep moving, but it also what propels them to persevere through the unimaginable.
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