The Best We Could Do

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

Thi Bui’s graphic memoir The Best We Could Do (2017) tells one family’s journey out of Vietnam and into America, drawn as well as written. It is a study text you can build a strong comparative answer around.

This is not a novel and it is not a film, and that is the first thing to get straight. The Best We Could Do is an illustrated memoir, a true story told in panels of hand-drawn artwork with a wash of muted orange-brown ink running through it. Thi Bui draws herself drawing the book, going back to her parents to ask them about their lives, and the page builds the story out of those interviews. So when you write about this text you are writing about both what is said and what is shown. A silence in the artwork, a single image stretched across a whole page, a tiny figure against a huge dark sea: these carry as much meaning as any line of dialogue.

The story moves between three time periods. In the present, Bui becomes a mother for the first time and the experience sends her back through her own history. In the recent past, her family escapes Vietnam by boat in 1978, ends up in a refugee camp in Malaysia, and is resettled in the United States. And further back, she reconstructs her parents’ separate childhoods in a Vietnam shaped by French colonial rule, partition, and the long war that followed. Her father Bo grew up poor and frightened in the north; her mother Ma was raised in more comfort in the south. The book follows both of them forward until their lives meet, marry, and fracture under the weight of everything they have lived through. Bui is trying to understand her parents as people rather than just as parents, and to work out what she has inherited from them without ever being told.