His endorsement is well-deserved, but that phrase feels too sentimental for what the reader finds inside. Nguyen provides a glowing cover blurb for Bui, declaring The Best We Could Do to be “a book to break your heart and heal it.” Both narratives are vital for the way they grant oft-generalized populations not just faces and names, but also political leanings, class backgrounds, personal failings, and all the other things that make a human. When Bui began work on The Best We Could Do in 2005, she couldn’t have predicted the significance it would hold when it was released in 2017, but now that it’s here, it feels like one of the first great works of socially relevant comics art of the Trump era.īy casting light on our present refugee crisis through the tilted mirror of the post-Vietnam one, Bui situates her tome alongside the winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer.
They’re refugees escaping to America from a region America burned to the ground, and Uncle Sam doesn’t tend to make such a process easy. How did we end up here, the story seems to ask, on the other side, so hopelessly jumbled?Īs with chess (as well as its Vietnamese counterpart, cờ tướng, which notably appears in the book), this family’s journey is maddeningly slow and constrained by a byzantine set of rules. In this case, that goal is understanding, be it on an individual or collective level. Nevertheless, they all push toward the same goal. The Best We Could Dois a fine moniker, but the name of this breathtaking work’s sixth chapter would fit the entire book even better: “The Chessboard.” Bui’s story is constructed like one, with the various members of her immediate and extended family beginning in the same place but moving away from it erratically, in fits and starts, eternally out of sync, and occasionally blocking each other’s paths.
My only complaint about Thi Bui’s debut graphic memoir, which tells the sweeping tale of her family’s lives in Vietnam and the United States, relates to its title.
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