The Best We Could Do

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do is a graphic memoir about a Vietnamese family who left by boat in 1978, told by a daughter who only starts to understand her parents once she becomes one herself.

Bui published it in 2017 after more than a decade of work. It began as an oral history project, interviewing her parents about their lives, and became something harder: a book that admits how much a child gets wrong about the people who raised them, and how much of that stays wrong even after the facts are known.

It is on the comparative list for 2027 and 2028. Studying a graphic memoir changes the job in one important way. The pictures are not illustrations of the text, they are half the text, and answers that ignore them lose marks that are freely available.

The Best We Could Do: The Story in Five Beats

One. The book opens in a delivery room in New York in 2005. Bui is giving birth to her first child. The experience does not make her feel closer to her mother, it makes her realise she has no idea who her mother is.

Two. She goes back to her father’s childhood in the north of Vietnam: French colonial rule, Japanese occupation, famine, a violent household and a boy who learned early to keep out of the way. Then her mother’s, in a comfortable southern family, educated and expecting a different life entirely.

Three. The country is partitioned in 1954 and the family moves south. Her parents meet, marry, and start a family through a war that is going on around their jobs, their flats and their children, described mostly through domestic detail rather than battles.

Four. Saigon falls in 1975. After three years of re-education, surveillance and shortages the family leaves by boat in 1978, spends time in a refugee camp in Malaysia, and is resettled in the United States.

Five. America is not an ending. Her father does not work and rarely leaves the house. Her mother works constantly. The children translate, interpret and grow up quickly. The book closes back in the present, with Bui watching her own son and deciding what she is going to hand him.

What the Drawings Are Doing

Bui works in ink brush with a single rust-coloured wash over black line, and that decision carries a lot of meaning. There is no full colour anywhere, so no era looks brighter or more real than any other, and the past does not arrive in sepia while the present is vivid. Memory and now are drawn in exactly the same register.

Watch the page layouts. Panels break their borders when a memory intrudes. A single image fills a whole page when something cannot be broken into steps: a boat on open water, a body of water at night, a child asleep. The gutters between panels do work too, because the space between two pictures is where a reader supplies what nobody in the family will say out loud.

Inherited Fear

The book’s central claim is that trauma does not stop at the border. Her father’s terror was formed in a childhood of war and violence, and it arrives intact in a suburban American house where nothing is happening. He is frightening to his children not because he hurts them but because he is afraid all the time and cannot explain why.

Bui is careful with this. She does not excuse him and she does not forgive him on the page. She shows what happened to him at eight years old, then shows what he was like as a father, and leaves them next to each other. That restraint is worth naming in an answer, because it is what stops the memoir becoming a plea.

Refugee, Not Immigrant

The book insists on the distinction and it matters for Cultural Context. Nobody in this family chose America. They chose not to stay where they were, which is a different decision, and everything that follows carries the mark of it: the camp, the paperwork, the sponsorship, the arrival somewhere cold and unfamiliar, the jobs available to people whose qualifications do not transfer.

Bui also refuses to let the war be a simple story. Her family are not on the side the American telling of the war expects them to be on, and she puts the French and Japanese occupations before the American war so that the whole century is visible. If your question touches on power, colonialism or displacement, that ordering is your evidence.

Becoming a Parent, Becoming a Child

The frame is the birth of her son, and the memoir returns to it. What she finds is that having a child does not deliver understanding automatically. It gives her one thing only: the knowledge of how frightened a new parent is, and from there she has to do the actual work of asking her mother and father what happened to them.

The title comes from that work. It is what parents say about the way they raised you when nothing else can be said, and Bui neither accepts nor rejects it. She lets it stand as a description of what was possible for two people in those conditions.

Who’s Who

Thi Bui narrates as an adult, appears as a child in the flashbacks, and is honest about how unreliable her own memories are.

Bố, her father, is the most complicated presence in the book: damaged, absent even when in the room, and given a full childhood so that we understand him without being told to.

Má, her mother, is competent, disappointed and enduring. Her account of the births of her children runs alongside Bui’s own and is deliberately harder.

Her siblings appear as the shared audience for the same childhood, and their different versions of it are part of the point.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Choose three sequences and describe the pictures, not just the events: the delivery room that opens the book, the boat and the camp, and the family’s first winter in America. In every point, say what the panel looks like, how it is laid out and what colour is doing, because that is where the marks are in a graphic text and most answers forget to claim them. Then compare on the same axis as your other texts: what a family carries with it when it has to leave.

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