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Chapter 9
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Best We Could Do, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family, Inheritance, and Parenthood
Intergenerational Trauma
Assimilation, Belonging, and Cultural Identity
Repression and Freedom
Memory and Perspective
Summary
Analysis
The narrative returns to where the first chapter left off: Thi lays in her hospital bed, having just given birth, and turns to her son. She realizes she “was[n’t] prepared for” parenthood. Her son is hungrier—and breastfeeding is harder—than she expects. He gets jaundice, and has to stay in the hospital. Worried, she asks Má about Giang Quyên’s death, and Má remembers Quyên’s last smile to her before passing away. Travis and Thi rent a room near the hospital and go visit their son every hour and a half. This is “the hardest week of [Thi’s] life,” because she is “called upon to be HEROIC.” She juxtaposes the image of herself, walking to the hospital, with illustrations of Bố piloting the boat and Má pregnant with Tâm.
The structure of Bui’s book allows her to indicate to the reader what she has learned from interviewing her parents about her own identity, family, and responsibility as a parent. In comparison to the sacrifices Má and Bố made, Bui feels that her problems are comparatively insignificant at first—as are her abilities. But her knowledge of her parents’ sacrifices are also what compel her to “be HEROIC” when duty calls, as she demonstrates by juxtaposing her image with Má and Bố’s. The first weeks of Bui’s son’s life, it seems, will be a test of all Bui has learned, an indication of whether the kind of memory she has dredged up and the narrative she has fashioned out of it successfully drive her to be a better mother and daughter.
Themes
When her son recovers and it is time to leave the hospital, Thi finally manages to breastfeed “COMPETENT[LY]” without help, and she starts speaking to him in Vietnamese: “Con ơi, mẹ nè,” she says, which means, “Child, it’s Mother.” Thi remembers her mother’s own voice, which she always “loved [for] its raspiness.” She remembers that her mother called herself Mẹ—a “weighty, serious, more elegant word” from the North—whereas her children called her by the Southern “‘Má,’ a jolly, bright sound we insisted fit her better.” But Thi wonders how she would react if her son, for instance, insisted on calling her “Mommy” instead of “Mama.”
Bui’s maternal instinct to talk with her son in Vietnamese suggests that the language is deeply embedded in her sense of identity. But she also sees that she has used the language to usurp her mother’s identity, to define Má in her own terms. Indeed, calling her Má instead of Mẹ seems like a way of depriving her mother of independence and seriousness, even a way of negating her sacrifices and contributions. Now that she is also a mother, Bui sees the other side of the equation and begins to think about what she can draw from her mother’s example—and what is incorrigibly different between them.
Themes
Working on her book, Thi Bui thinks about her parenthood and recognizes that she is “no longer a kid” and “not the center of the universe.” But she thinks that “being [someone’s] child” guarantees a lifetime of selfishness because children are always resentful of their parents’ past decisions. Breastfeeding her son alone in a large, empty expanse, Thi notes that “to accidentally call myself Mẹ / was to slip myself into her [Má’s] shoes / just for a moment.” Considering her mother as a younger, more fashionable woman, Thi realizes that she must see Má as a complex individual rather than merely her mother.
Between Bui’s parenthood and her research, her identity has transformed forever, and she now realizes not to fault her parents for doing the best they could do. (This new understanding is, of course, the basis for the book’s title.) So now, returning to the problem she posed at the beginning of the book—how to simultaneously be a child and a parent—Bui realizes that the first step is to challenge her conceptions of her own mother, to see Má in all her complexity rather than simply in the role of caregiver. And this new understanding of complexity means that Bui can learn to forgive Má for her mistakes—and, by extension, herself for her own.
Themes
Thi remembers saving coins as a child, and gifting them to her mother one year on Mother’s Day: she thought she had amassed $100, but she was wrong, and she remembers crying to Má because of it. She wonders if Má blames her, and how she can cope with all the anger she’s held onto. Thi knows that life is finite, but wonders what happens to people when we die, and whether we people live on in the legacies they leave for their children. Is her identity “predestined” by her family’s past, she asks, reconstructing her family tree? Is she necessarily “a product of war,” and will she ever “measure up to” her own mother? Or maybe her responsibility is simply to “always feel the weight of their past.” As a child, she is forever indebted to her parents.
Rather than remembering all the times her mother has let her down, Bui looks at an example of the opposite, and suggests that Má is also capable of a similar forgiveness—indeed, that her endless labor and sacrifice mean she has always already forgiven her children for being forever unable to “repay” her. Although Má and Bố might not have gotten the same from their parents, the thing that now binds them to their children—which is the same as the thing their children inherit—is an unpayable debt and a reciprocal obligation to unconditional, loving sacrifice. Thi and her siblings owe it to their parents and their own children to pass this debt along.
Themes
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Alongside images of herself fleeing Việt Nam with a backpack, Thi notes that she “no longer feel[s] the need to reclaim a HOMELAND,” since she now knows that this place was always in flux throughout her parents’ lives. “Việt Nam was not [Thi’s] country at all.” But, holding her son, Thi worries that she might “pass along some gene for sorrow / or unintentionally inflict damage I could never undo.” She looks out at her now-10-year-old son, playing in the ocean. He does not look like “war and loss,” but rather “a new life, bound with mine quite by coincidence.” He has the chance to “be free.”
Bui now turns to the other aspect of her inheritance: the national and cultural identities that she struggled with for much of the book, and that she tried to reclaim upon her visit to Việt Nam in 2001. But she realizes that her parents never got to claim this identity, either, for they lived in so many different versions of Việt Nam that there is no single “HOMELAND” they can clearly point to. By recognizing her parents’ sacrifice, processing it through this book, and replicating it for her children, Bui hopes, she can pass along the best of her inheritance without saddling her son with the trauma of “war and loss.” The book’s closing panel clearly imitates the second-to-last panel of Chapter 3, in which Thi dreamed about herself swimming freely in the ocean as a child. By replicating this image with her own son in her place, Bui shows that people also inherit the quest for freedom from their parents—and parents must do the best they can to support their children’s quests while fulfilling their own.
Themes
