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Chapter 5
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
Thi Bui illustrates herself looking out over the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, alongside Bố standing on the sidewalk in Sài Gòn. She writes that they both felt “awe and excitement” upon moving to “the big city.” Bố and his grandfather live well when they get to Sài Gòn in 1955. His grandmother comes shortly thereafter, but refuses to live with his grandfather until she nearly gets caught in the crossfire of a street battle between Ngô Đình Diệm’s government forces and the local mafia, or Bình Xuyên. The shooting destroys her opium jars, and out of desperation, she goes back to Bố’s grandfather.
Just as she empathizes with Má’s life in Việt Nam through the shared experience of childbirth, Thi Bui connects her experience moving to New York to Bố’s in Sài Gòn, in an attempt to try and reconstruct the emotional texture of their memories in a way that simple third-person narrative cannot do—and a way that Bui’s illustrations facilitate. Like Má in her French school, Bố finds freedom and the material comfort he needs to pursue it in Sài Gòn, so for the first time he can shape his own identity and follow his own desires. Meanwhile, a frightening twist of fate again forces Bố’s grandmother to return to her abusive husband and reminds the reader that the conflicts that have repeatedly uprooted Bố are far from over.
Themes
Bố’s grandmother and grandfather buy a cheap house, which Bố explains to Thi is “really just the space between two other houses […] with a roof made of palm leaves” on top. Thi realizes that she lived there, too, when she was a baby—it was her “first home.” She recalls visiting the house in 2001—although “the street ha[s] changed beyond recognition,” a neighbor recognizes Má and points her to the right house. Everyone reacts differently: Lan looks ahead, Má and Bích are thrilled, Thi and Tâm are “documenting in lieu of remembering” with their cameras, and Travis lingers awkwardly in the background. But a new family lives in the house, and Thi’s family does not enter.
Bui learns about this house before connecting it to her own past, which attests to how little she really knows about her family’s time in Việt Nam: although she lived there, she has no memories of it, and so it feels like a hole in her identity. Nevertheless, for the rest of the family, memory does not match up to the Sài Gòn they see in 2001—and the house that used to be theirs is no longer accessible to them, which demonstrates the futility of trying to reproduce and return to one’s memories, which by definition cannot exist in the present. At the same time, Thi and Tâm’s mission—“documenting in lieu of remembering”—also describes her mission in this book and shows how important it is to combine documentable facts with firsthand lived experience in order to understand the past.
Themes
As Thi’s family walks around the neighborhood, Thi’s older sisters Lan and Bích catalogue their memories, but Thi has none. She remedies this with research—Bố gives her an old American documentary with video of their neighborhood, “Bàn Cờ, or the CHESSBOARD…” so called “because of the maze of alleys and passageways.” Thi notes that the documentary portrays her neighborhood as a “caricature” of poverty and criminality, so she wonders how to draw it in her book and decides to model it after the Lower East Side. She also draws the chessboard Bố once made her, and playing the game, she realizes that “none of the Vietnamese people in [the American documentary] have a name or a voice,” including herself and her family. Instead, they were “more like ants, scrambling out of the way of giants,” only hoping to resume their normal lives.
Bui continues to emphasize the role of narrative form in the transmission and understanding of history: like most American media about Việt Nam, this documentary treats them “like ants” who have no moral or human value in comparison to Americans. Of course, the “ants” metaphor also describes the way historical and political narratives tend to ignore the interests and experiences of normal people. Bui bases her illustration of Bàn Cờ on New York’s Lower East Side because the latter is a familiar example to her; the fact that a city she has adopted resonates more with her than the city where she was born is an early sign that she cannot claim Việt Nam as her country in any meaningful sense, no matter how much she tries to understand her identity by investigating it.
Themes
Bố grows up like this in the tiny Bàn Cờ house, but also goes to one of the city’s fanciest private schools. He dresses “like a movie star” and likes to imagine he is one. He reads existentialist philosophers and listens to rock, and hangs out on benches smoking cigarettes in “shoes with no socks, [a] shirt with all the buttons undone, [his] hair long and [his] pants tight.” Bố and his grandmother both get tuberculosis, which nearly causes him to fail out off school, but he still graduates, and joins the Teachers College because it guarantees him a job, salary, and a way out of Ngô Đình Diệm’s military draft. It is at the Teachers College that Bố meets Má.
Bố’s divided life, although in retrospect fitting or even stereotypical for a rebellious but wavering young communist, also speaks volumes about South Việt Nam’s precarious position between colonialism and freedom in the aftermath of World War II. And of course, like many adolescents’ clothing, Bố’s demonstrates his desire to stand out and take control of his own identity. Nevertheless, the threat of the military draft shows that his life in South Việt Nam will not remain his own, and even though he joins the Teachers College mostly out of circumstance and political convenience, it ends up defining the rest of his life.
Themes
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Although Thi wishes it were “a happy story,” Má reveals that, although she loved her high school in Đà Lạt, college was a hard time in her life. After meeting Bố, he takes up all of Má’s time, and she has little freedom. As Má narrates all of this to Travis in the front seat of the car, Thi sits in the back and realizes she is conflicted, since it’s clear that her mother was happier before she got married and had a family. A few years later, when Má is 71 and Thi is 40, Thi again asks Má about this period of her life. Má explains that she wanted to be a doctor, or to study abroad outside of Việt Nam, but never had the chance to do either.
Má’s decision to marry Bố begins looking more and more contradictory: although they were both enjoying their freedom in these years, they sacrificed it all to marry, something neither of them particularly wanted to do. Thi also learns that Má was much more than just her mother—that she had an entirely different life with completely different aspirations before having a family. In a sense, Bui and her siblings are responsible for crushing Má’s dreams—although, of course, this does not mean she loves them any less.
Themes
At her drawing table, Thi looks over two photos from the Christmas party at which Má and Bố met, which she also illustrates into the story. Her mother was 19 and her father 22, and they married quickly because, as everyone realizes but Thi’s parents will never admit, Má was pregnant. Má’s family disapproved of Bố, mostly because of his social class, but Má loved his intelligence. Má declares that she still thought she could study abroad because, “to tell you the truth, I didn’t think he would live all that long!” The summer after she started college, Bố felt seriously ill, and she thought she would make the end of his life happy—Thi interjects, “and then be free as a widow?” With a palm turned upward, Má signals her agreement. Thi draws photos of the wedding and Má moving in with Bố. “It turns out,” Má reveals, “he got better.”
Like so many couples, Má and Bố end up together because of an accident and then make the best of their new situation, even though it means throwing away their plans and dreams. Understandably, Bui is surprised to hear that Má expected Bố would die (and might have even secretly hoped he would, since becoming a widow would mean she could live as a single woman without social pressure to marry). Both these twists remind Bui that, unlike her own marriage and parenthood, Má and Bố’s was not completely intentional or planned—but unlike Bố’s parents, Má and Bố nevertheless stuck by their children and did whatever they could to guarantee a better life for them. By looking at the Christmas party photo and illustrating their wedding, Bui attempts to get into Má and Bố’s psyches and understand how, at one time, they could have intensely loved each other and been happy together.
Themes
Despite Má’s dashed expectations, she is excited about her first baby with Bố—but when Quyên dies, Má and Bố leave Sài Gòn to go teach in a rural town in the Mekong Delta, which they fell in love with after seeing a documentary set there. They leave Bố’s grandmother and grandfather in Sài Gòn, and they expect a carefree “honeymoon period.” But this is 1965, and the war is already starting. The Americans destroy Việt Nam’s agriculture with Agent Orange and create hyperinflation by introducing cheap military goods into the economy, which makes Má and Bố’s wages fall rapidly.
Quyên’s tragic death returns Má and Bố to their state of relative freedom, but only by shattering their hopes and expectations about building a future together through parenthood. After taking decisive action to improve their lives by moving to the countryside, however, Má and Bố end up trapped in the same cycle as before, with politics upturning their plans and forcing them to return to “survival mode.” This also shows that, contrary to the narratives often told in the United States about the Vietnam War, American involvement did not immediately improve life in South Việt Nam—in fact, it did just the opposite.
Themes
South Việt Nam became a “police state,” and the police interrogated Bố. A general even threatened to cut his “hippie” hair until he pointed out that his students would note the change. In fact, this was ordered by “the SAME general in that famous ‘Saigon Execution’ photo.” Bố mentions that this photo was misinterpreted—not because the South Vietnamese were not brutally violent, but because the Việt Cộng man shot in the photo had just massacred “an entire family.”
Ultimately, Bố suffers the same oppression in the South that he fled the North to avoid. However, his mixed feelings about this general again show how the narratives told about the war in the United States are unnecessarily simplistic, whereas in reality Bui’s parents see good intentions and profound evil on the part of both the North and the South (as well as the French and the Americans).
Themes
Alone, Thi confuses herself trying to clarify whether her father “hate[s] the general” and “like[s] Communism or not.” She is disturbed by “the contradiction in [her] father’s stories,” but also by “the oversimplifications and stereotypes in American versions of the Vietnam War.” She explains that Eddie Adams, who took the “Saigon Execution” and won a Pulitzer Prize for it, also “knew the context of the shooting” and was tormented by the misinterpretations of it for years. Eventually, Adams found and apologized to the general from the photo, who was “in a state fallen from grace— / —working behind the counter in a pizzeria in Virginia.”
In fact, Thi Bui realizes, the seeming “contradiction[s]” in her father’s stories are products of his experience: he realizes that the different sides in Việt Nam’s conflict were not singular actors, but rather groups made up of various parts which were themselves often in disagreement. The photographer’s sense of guilt is based on the same principle: his desire to document events on the ground and deepen the conversation about the war in fact did the opposite, leading people to snap judgments. And indeed, the ruthless general’s ultimate fate—which clearly parallels Bui’s parents’ “fall[] from grace”—implores the reader to see the humanity in even a ruthless killer, not because he should be forgiven or felt sorry for, but rather because this is a way of seeing that stories of war and loss are incredibly complex.
Themes
While “Saigon Execution” convinced many Americans to oppose the war, Thi Bui emphasizes that “for the Vietnamese… / the war continued, / whether America was involved or not.” Má and Bố lost close friends and nearly died themselves. They were constantly separated and stressed while they were busy being parents, ultimately giving birth to Thi “three months before South Việt Nam lost the war.”
Bui finishes her appeal to American readers by reminding them that, although in the United States the Vietnam War ended in 1973, in fact the American withdrawal led to the intensification of conflict in Việt Nam and the defeat of the ally that America abandoned. Bui is not saying that the United States should not have withdrawn, but rather showing that it was in some way too late for the United States to undo the damage it did by involving itself in the war.
Themes
