The Best We Can Do

The day I brought my first child home from the hospital, my mother met me at my front door to tell me she was divorcing my father. Mom had made similar threats of leaving Dad before, yet somehow this time I knew to take her seriously. I was already tired and emotionally drained that week from a difficult labor coupled with an emergency c-section, and my hormones were all over the place. As my mother shared her news, I remember robotically rocking my baby while silent tears streamed down my face. When I think back to that day, the pain of it all would still have the power to bring me to my knees if I were to allow it. But I don’t. Because my mother also taught me to pull myself up by my bootstraps and keep moving forward. The relationship between mothers and daughters is often a difficult subject, something even I don’t fully understand myself.

 In her 2017 graphic novel The Best We Could Do, author Thi Bui skillfully weaves a story about her Vietnamese family and the complicated, often contradictory, dynamics inherent in mother/daughter relationships. By piecing together family stories and personal memories, Bui recounts her family’s refugee journey through war, poverty and displacement. Written over the span of ten years (which started as a student project and worked its way into a fully-fledged parent/child biopic), The Best We Could Do is told through hundreds of hand-drawn illustrations, all carefully and painstakingly rendered. It’s a testament to the power of art to evoke emotions. Through its beautiful illustrations and an emotionally complex mother/daughter relationship, The Best We Could Do is a stunning achievement in modern storytelling.

While some critics may dismiss comic books as cheap entertainment for children, what if they were used to tell a real human story based on true events? The Best We Could Do is exactly, beautifully, that kind of book (think more along the lines of Maus rather than Watchmen). It’s a story about a family immigrating to America after the fall of Saigon in the late 1970s. And while it is a graphic novel, there is nothing cartoonish or childish about Bui’s work. The entire book is illustrated in gorgeous black, white, and muted, tea-dyed color artwork, rich with the span of the human experience. Each page is hand-drawn with specific purpose and care (the picture spread across pages 248-9 was a particular favorite). The Best We Could Do is perfect blend of art and memoir come to life.

What makes The Best We Could Do truly special, however, are the faces of Bui’s family, particularly the women, which become achingly familiar yet compellingly unique. There is Thi herself (pronounced “tea”), as well as her parents Má and Bố, all three are dimensional and fully fleshed-out. There are the children: Lan, Bich, and Tam, as well as the ghosts of the two siblings who have died (hauntingly portrayed on page 29). But the best, most interesting characters are Thi and her mother, Má. Bui reflects, “Writing about my mother is harder for me – maybe because my image of her is too tied up with my opinion of myself” (Bui, 131). It’s a warning to readers that it is difficult for Bui to be objective when writing about their relationship.

Not unlike myself, Bui is simultaneously fascinated and frustrated by her mother. We see this right from the beginning in the very first chapter of the book where Bui is giving birth to her first child and Má’s first grandchild. It’s an intense scene that was difficult for me as a reader, especially as it hit a little too close to home. Bui explains that the trauma of her labor was too much for her mother, who had to excuse herself from the room (Bui, 3). This is also a bit of foreshadowing that Má will be absent from certain crucial moments throughout Bui’s life. All of this leads me to wonder if the birth of my first child, my mother’s first grandchild, was also a deeply emotional trigger for my mom.

While the pain and the emotion of giving birth is understandable, there are other, more convoluted instances where we see Má’s unpredictable behavior. One example is Má’s rationale to Thi that she married her father because she thought he would probably die soon anyways. This idea rings so strangely false as to seem like the plot of a bad soap opera. Was this a story she conjured up in her own mind to justify her actions? (Bui suspects the reason may be that her mom was unmarried and pregnant.) The drawing of Má on page 195, without a caption, where she is seen throwing up her hands in defeat is alternately maddening and hilarious at the same time. Bui expresses her desire to write a perfect, romantic story of true love between Má and Bố, but even she acknowledges, “I’d like to tell this as a happy story, in which a young man, my father, meets a young woman, my mother. They fall in love and marry…but my mother’s version of the story foils it” (Bui, 190). It’s this narrative introspection that leads readers to wonder if Bui may be more objective about her mother than she realizes.

Not everything about Má, or my own mother, is negative, however. The grit and determination it must have taken for Má to leave her home and move to a foreign country, all while raising four children, giving birth, and working hours a day at a job that Bố considers beneath her, to financially support the family is more than just commendable, it’s downright heroic. I loved Bui’s description of her mother feeling soft and smelling like Oil of Olay. Má is seen in the next frame sitting at a table and peeling fruit for her children, “even the grapes” (Bui, 133). It’s these touching, sentimental views of Má that are the beating heart of the Bui family in The Best We Could Do.

My own mother worked very hard and taught my sisters and me the value of a job well done. Growing up on a farm we learned to take care of animals, muck stalls, plant a garden, clean a house from top to bottom, and work our way around a stove. Because we lived in many homes that required extensive renovations, my mom also taught me how to hang sheetrock, tape and texture, mud a room, and use a paint roller. Yet despite all her life lessons and guidance, my estrangement from her continues. It isn’t something I often talk about, likely because most people can’t or won’t comprehend that the emotional and physical pain of being near her has forced me to live my life separately from hers. There is no one in the world who has the power to love me and hurt me more than my mother. Bui herself is much more forgiving of her own mother. She acknowledges Má’s mistakes but allows Má’s journey be what it is: Má’s journey. All of this hearkens back to the notion that relationships between mothers and daughters can be beautiful and deeply, exceptionally complicated. Further proof that we are all just trying to do the best we can do.

Works Cited

Bui, Thi. The Best We Could Do. Abrams ComicArts, 2018.