When we first meet him, he is a brooding figure who seems to live only to chain smoke and rationalize his distance from his family. The Best We Could Do approaches this apparent intransigence as a mystery to be untangled.īui’s deeply conflicted portrayal of her father Bô, is perhaps the book’s most compelling sketch. When we meet them as older people, Bô and Má are, each in their own way, irascible and unpleasant in ways that Bui finds baffling at first. In its place is a far more challenging vision of the immigrant experience in which scars remain and the sacrifices may not have been worth it. Bui eschews the easy narrative of triumph over adversity when recounting her parents’ experiences as refugees and immigrants. The story is bookended by the birth of Bui’s son Travis, but the real heart of The Best We Could Do seems to come in Bui’s ambivalence over her father and mother, Bô and Má. Bui alternatingly tells the story of her life as a new mother in California, her parents’ upbringing in Vietnam, and that of the sweeping changes that bring these two worlds together. Like these works, The Best We Could Do provides an intimate and compelling treatment of life amidst political crisis. Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do is a new graphic memoir that immediately invites comparisons to works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.

The best we could do pages