In the Wake of Trauma

The Best We Could Do draws readers into the often unspoken pain of growing up in the wake of the traumas that Thi Bui and her family endured during and after the Vietnam War. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography and already translated into Spanish and Italian, Bui’s haunting memoir contributes a visually complex graphic narrative to the emerging genre of refugee literature.

In 1978, after fleeing from Vietnam to Malaysia, the Bui family was relocated to Chicago in a matter of months thanks to the help of a sponsoring family. This historical depiction of a refugee experience stands in stark contrast to the reality of the world’s more than 22 million refugees seeking asylum today, the vast majority of whom will not achieve resettlement in their lifetimes. In the face of this staggering reality, the events depicted in The Best We Can Do seem to offer the consolation of particularity: in it, we track how one family persists, contorts, and reconstitutes itself despite experiences of abandonment, hunger, displacement, and crippling uncertainty. But Bui complicates this consolation by confronting readers with the human cost of war and the long shadow that it casts in the lives of the “lucky” ones who, like her family, escaped Vietnam and avoided decades of languishing in refugee camps and other spaces of detainment.

The memoir begins with a full-page image of a pregnant belly seen from above. Meeting our narrator in childbirth is apt, given that becoming a mother is what triggers Bui’s quest to understand her parents—or at least to encounter them in their complexity and in the context of their histories rather than as “two sides of a chasm, full of meaning and resentment.”

From here, the narrative is organized around Bui’s longing for “an origin story that will set everything right,” and we track her efforts to amass historical knowledge and extensive family testimony. But as Bui struggles to achieve reconciliation with the pain that has been suffered and transmitted, that reconciliation comes from loosening her hold on the particulars of the past and instead unspooling their emotional content. In contrast to the understated text, the panels of the memoir ache with such verbs as withholding, denying, stifling, longing, drifting, dreading, hoping, with nouns like birth, water, blood, milk, fear, and hunger.

Bui excels at depicting suppressed physical pain and afflictive emotion in the human figures she draws. If we return to the opening scene of Bui’s own labor, we encounter the description of pain that “comes in twenty-foot waves,” but the visual narrative makes clear that the most potent source of hurt for Bui is her mother’s sudden departure from the hospital room. Bui depicts her mother in the hallway just outside, her eyes cast down, eyebrows gathered, one hand pressed across her mouth and the other braced across her stomach as if contracting around the remembered pain of her six childbirths and the periods of grave unrest and danger that accompanied them. Like many gestures of suffering in the narrative, we will see this posture repeated in other bodies, as in an image of Bui as a small girl terrified by her father’s menacing presence. Postural echoes like these abound in the memoir, subtly signaling the embodied character of intergenerational trauma.

The opening labor scene also initiates a painstaking process by which Bui will chronicle all six of her mother’s experiences in childbirth at various points in the narrative, including those siblings who did not survive. To remember and record these births in a ritual act by giving each scene of pain and possibility its due offers one metaphor for the work as a whole. Bui’s own birth comes just three months before the surrender of South Vietnam, which means that she has no memories of this period in her family’s suffering. In the...