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Chapter 4
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
Sitting at her drawing table, Thi Bui notes that she has more trouble writing about Má, whose identity is too closely tied to Thi’s perception of herself. She looks at an old photo of Má and remarks that everyone says they look alike—although Thi thinks Má was more beautiful. But, during Thi’s childhood, Má is older, less beautiful, and busier than she is in the photos. She works and does everything for her kids on top of it—so Thi has no idea what Má used to look like until one day, the family “receive[s] a box of old photos from Việt Nam.” With these photos, Thi learns to see her mother as “a princess” and Việt Nam as “a country more ancient and romantic than the one I knew.”
Turning from Bố to Má, Thi Bui begins to examine two other kinds of inheritance: her physical inheritance from her mother and the photos she has inherited from (and about) her. The photos represent another kind of memory for Thi: something physical and tangible, as compared to the unreliable and emotional record of Má’s memories. She can know Má as she was before becoming a mother, before sacrificing her independence and beauty for her family. But this is precisely what lets her set up a romantic fantasy of Má’s—and Việt Nam’s—past. Of course, one of the reasons Bui wrote this book was to test this fantasy against reality.
Themes
In her adulthood, however, Thi rethinks her old fantasies about Việt Nam when she starts doing oral histories with her family. But Má tells Thi very little—she says more to Travis. Má is born in Cambodia in 1943, where her father is an important engineer with a well-paid government job. But Má’s family has to flee Cambodia for the central Vietnamese coastal city of Nha Trang, where Má grows up as the beloved youngest sister. She loves swimming in the ocean and succeeds in the “EXPENSIVE!” French colonial school. She starts out reading French books, but learns to read Vietnamese so that her siblings will not make fun of her (and then gets bored and starts teaching her family’s servants how to read).
Má’s reluctance to talk with Thi reflects, perhaps, her fear that knowledge of Má’s past might somehow injure her daughter. Má’s childhood is a stark contrast with Bố’s: she is relatively free and unburdened by family conflict, even though her father does need to leave Cambodia for political reasons. And, of course, her family is wealthy and well-connected. Through Má’s academic prowess, however, she soon realizes the contradiction in being a colonial subject so closely tied to the French that she cannot even read her native language.
Themes
But Má's mother is strict, distant, and humorless. She spends her time putting on fancy dinner parties but ignores her children. Meanwhile, Má befriends a servant girl named Tranh, who brings Má to her home in the countryside for vacation during the summers. Tranh’s family soon marries her off, however, and Má returns to books. She secretly reads a romance novel about a man who fights the French—just as her paternal uncle has done (and gotten imprisoned for)—and then starts reading about the history of colonialism. Má becomes a nationalist and refuses to “speak French outside of school anymore.” But then she gets sent to a French high school in Đà Lạt, where “everyone is a complete FRANCOPHILE!” She cannot stand it and calls her father to take her home.
One similarity between Má and Bố’s childhoods is that neither of them has a close relationship with their parents: Má is essentially completely independent as a girl, and her friendship with Tranh indicates that her sense of identity (unlike her mother’s) is not yet based on the social and economic hierarchy in which she grows up. However, Má’s fascination with the countryside and Tranh’s early marriage are symptoms of this hierarchy, and when Má comes to fully understand it—namely, when she realizes that her own privilege is a product of her family’s contribution to a colonial regime that oppresses her people—she immediately takes a political stand.
Themes
Thi notes that Má’s father had once suffered a nervous breakdown because of a Frenchman.” One of his bosses, who had complete power over him, abused him to the point that he had a mental breakdown and was institutionalized for six months.
In fact, despite Má’s mother’s investment in high society, Má’s father does not accept the colonial regime as legitimate and sees the oppression and madness in the foreign rule to which his country is subjected.
Themes
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Má goes to a different French school, where she fits in much better and dreams about forging her own path in life. She becomes a freethinker—as Thi depicts it, Má believes that “MARRIAGE = TRAP” and “EDUCATION = FREEDOM.” But Má gets married anyway. How, Thi wonders, could two people who are as different as Má and Bố end up together? Beside an illustration of Bố cowering in a corner, Thi wonders, “how did they even meet?”
At this stage, Má and Bố’s trajectories could not be more different: she uses the advantages her colonial education gives her—freedom of thought, material comfort, and leisure time with likeminded students—to envision a future free from the social hierarchies that entrap Bố. And yet she lives them out anyway, building and dedicating herself to her family despite her intentions to avoid doing so.
Themes
Thi turns to Bố’s life after his move to Hải Phòng. His grandmother and grandfather open stores and he becomes “citified.” Thi draws all the changes, from Bố’s new clothes to his new bicycle to his new taste for city food. His grandparents manage to send him to French school, where he is surrounded by the children of the Vietnamese upper classes and French colonists. Bố sees that these same people are responsible for Việt Nam’s severe inequality and becomes a communist, to his grandparents’ chagrin.
At last, Bố finds a semblance of stability living with his grandparents in Hải Phòng. As if his move to the city does not already require enough of an adjustment, however, he now has a contradictory experience in French school similar to Má’s; he recognizes that he is benefitting from inequality and injustice, and that he should neither wholeheartedly reject nor unquestioningly accept these advantages. Ironically, too, Bố now understands why his father—whom he has disowned—became a communist.
Themes
In an aside, beside images of war and the replacement of the French flag with the Vietnamese one, Thi Bui urges the reader to recall that “every casualty in war is someone’s grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, brother, sister, child, lover.” She explains that 94,000 French and at least 300,000 Vietnamese died during the Revolution.
Bui realizes that the details of Việt Nam’s war of independence against the French are too complex to include here, so she instead makes an important point about how history should be told: specifically, she thinks it is essential to remember the personal narratives that lie behind it, and to recount these personal narratives alongside official statistics and dates in order to give them an emotional texture appropriate to their reality.
Themes
After Việt Nam’s independence, Bố’s French school is disbanded and he goes to Sài Gòn, where there is still a school for him to attend. But his father, now a powerful figure in the Việt Minh, calls to see him in Hà Nội. Bố is surprised to see everyone (“even children”) working, and the poverty of the countryside around the city. Bố goes to visit family in the town of Thái Bình, which is “deep Communist territory,” and where the police actively persecute dissidents. Even deeper into the countryside, Bố meets his father’s new family—his third. He meets his younger siblings, who give him their portion of dinner, and then talks politics with his dad.
In short, when Việt Nam wins its independence, the country gets divided in two. North Việt Nam—ruled by Hồ Chí Minh’s Communist Việt Minh—turns its back on Western colonialism, while the South continues to embrace support from France and the United States. Bố’s perspective attests to the contrast between these halves, and he is part of a large-scale migration during this period from the war-torn North to the not-yet-war-torn South (which, however, becomes the theater for the Vietnam War in the coming decades). His encounter with his father again puts the personal and the political in conflict, and although Bố was at one point a communist himself, he has just realized that he is unwilling to submit to the iron fist of one-party rule.
Themes
With an illustrated map, Bui explains the political situation at this time, in 1954. Việt Nam is provisionally divided between North and South for two years, until the planned elections. There is “a MASS EXODUS” from North to South.
Needless to say, the planned elections never happen—after a coup d’état, the South refuses to honor them. Like many others, Bố moves south to pursue his freedom, but he does not yet know that he will face another oppressive police state when he arrives. In other words, he flees repression only to run straight back into it.
Themes
Bố’s father expects Bố to stay in the North. But, having seen the poverty and conformity of the North, Bố wants to return to Sài Gòn in the South. Plus, the land reforms mean his grandmother will lose her property—and the whole family could be killed. Bố and his grandfather pack their things and sign up to go south with the Americans. Bố’s grandmother does not, however: after a nasty fight with Bố’s grandfather, she ends up in the hospital, and she cuts things off with her husband as soon as she gets out. Bố and his grandfather board a large American ship in Hải Phòng, and arrive in Hạ Long Bay many hours later.
Bố resolutely chooses both the life he wants and the man who has actually cared for him—his grandfather—over his dishonest father, whose promises of family unity are vague, manipulative, and too-little-too-late. (While Bố’s grandfather is no better to his wife than Bố’s father was to Bố’s mother, he takes care of Bố at the very least.) The land reforms are, in a sense, Bố’s father’s unintentional revenge against the village that rejected him—and a concrete motive for Bố to leave North Việt Nam as fast as possible.
Themes
