The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir

This graphic memoir traces the Vietnam War and refugee migration through family memory. Prompted by childbirth, the narrator turns toward her parents’ past and renders family history, loss, and immigrant belonging with quiet force.

Vietnamese refugeesfamily historygraphic memoirmigration

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Work Information

Lines tracing family silence reveal the years survived as refugees.

A nonfiction graphic novel that layers intimate family history with war, exile, and the memory of parent-child relationships. A Japanese translation is available.

Review Summaries

Readers and critics value the restrained power of the art and prose and the honesty of its family memory. Its ability to bring history into bodily, personal experience leaves a strong aftereffect.

Book Information

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Published: 2017-03-07
Pages: 327 pages
Language: 英語
Size: 23.4 x 17.5 x 1.4 cm
ISBN-13: 9781419718779
ISBN-10: 1419718770
Price: 5461 JPY
Category: 洋書/Biographies & Memoirs/Specific Groups/Women

A national bestseller and American Book Award winner, The Best We Could Do is an intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family’s journey from war-torn Vietnam from debut author Thi Bui . In what Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “a book to break your heart and heal it,” The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui’s journey of understanding and provides inspiration to all of those who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past. This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family. Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui’s story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home. National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Finalist ABA Indies Introduce Winter ALA Notable Books Selection

Thi Bui was born in Việt Nam three months before the end of the American War, and came to the United States in 1978 as part of the “boat people” wave of refugees from Southeast Asia. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017), has been selected as UCLA’s Common Book for 2017, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, an Eisner Award finalist in Reality Based Comics, and made several Best of 2017 book lists, including Bill Gates’s top five picks. Bui is also the Caldecott Honor-winning illustrator of A Different Pond , a picture book by the poet Bao Phi (Capstone, 2017). Her short comics can be found online at The Nib, Reveal News, PEN America, and BOOM California. She is currently researching and drawing a work of graphic nonfiction about how Asian Americans are impacted by incarceration and deportation, to be published by One World, Random House. Bui taught high school in New York City and was a founding teacher of Oakland International High School, the first public high school in California for recent immigrants and English learners. Since 2015, she has been a faculty member of the MFA in Comics program at the California College of the Arts. Thi Bui lives in the Bay Area.

Reviews

Riveting reading. The illustrations complement the honest no-frills text beautifully. Well worth the read. I had the privilege of being the author’s Uber driver to the airport when she visited Perth . Chatting to her I learnt about this graphic novel she’d written over a 10 year labour of love, so I wanted to buy a copy to read. A wonderful and informative traumatic family history, excellent read!
reçu à temps et dans le même état que promis.
I loved this book. I devoured the entire thing in one sitting on a Sunday afternoon. It's a beautiful and tragic and warm story all at the same time. I feel like a lot of times when we hear about the Vietnam war in the United States, it's told from the perspective of American soldiers rather than the Southern Vietnamese who lost their home land. Really refreshing to see this diverse and nuanced perspective. I look forward to Thi Bui's future works.
Muy buen servicio
I've read this as an e-book on my Note Air 3C. This is a very special, very personal story. As far as I understood, it's the personal story of the author's family. Even though it is a graphic novel and may sometimes look like a childs comics, and even there are children in this story, it is far from being for children. It is a story of a family in a war-ridden country called Viet Nam. I'm not american so Viet Nam isn't part of the history of my country, but because the US produces movies and other fiction about its war there and exports it to the rest of the world, I did have a picture in my mind about the country and the war. Now this book delivers a view of the people who actually lived and live there, but the fascinating thing is that it isn't written by someone who really grew up there. Instead, it's the viewpoint of a person who only has vague memories about the childhood in Viet Nam. Thi Bui is only 2 years older than me, so she clearly can't remember 1978 when her family made the escape from Viet Nam. The book explains the backstory of her parents, beginning with their childhood and how they met, how they got their children, how the war and the communist terror that followed it, forced them to leave. That is the one side of this novel. The other is the persons they have become because of it, and the way they deal with it, and how their children live with them. A father who is traumatized and often alien, a mother who is very demanding. It's the story of how the author learns to understand why they are how they are. All of this is presented in beautiful, simple, easy to understand pictures that look like images and have very little color. They look like sketches. Personally I loved them. Even on the E Ink tablet they looked terrific. This book is about the difficult sides of live and mankind. War, torture, alienated families, abortion, racism, being a foreigner, having to adapt to a foreign culture, not knowing about your origins and so on. The terror of the communist regime is displayed in few simple sketches but blows away any romantic illusions you may have had about it on the previous pages (because the book DOES show how a small group of land owners and french invaders lived feudal lives while most of the rest had little to nothing). It is a book that is worth reading and I enjoyed it, even though it is very tough to swallow at some points.