Birthing a Graphic Archive of Memory: Re-Viewing the Refugee Experience in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do

Introduction

The Vietnam War is one of the most photographed and iconic wars, producing hundreds of books, comics, documentaries, films, and television shows. Images of the Vietnam War have been constructed through prose fiction such as Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country (1985), and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), as well as Hollywood blockbusters, including The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986), and Full Metal Jacket (1987). In addition to fiction and films about the Vietnam War, there have been comic series that depict the war and its aftereffects, such as Don Lomax’s Vietnam Journals .¹ The United States has produced fiction and film about the Vietnam War for over fifty years, mostly centering on narratives of aggression by the Việt Minh and portraying the Vietnamese people as victims needing rescue, usually by a white male savior.² Such stories of rescue and masculine bravado reinforce American exceptionalism and racial hierarchies. These narratives typically focus on an individual male; assert collective camaraderie; depict racial and dehumanizing portrayals of Vietnamese people, whether from the North or South; exclude female characters except as Vietnamese prostitutes or American nurses; and suggest that American soldiers were victimized physically, psychologically, and politically. Such narratives that dominate the canon of prose and films of the Vietnam War insist on replicating a story of American exceptionalism as the male soldier seems to transcend culture, time, and geography in order to be iconized outside of history.³ The plethora of fiction and film produced by the West on the Vietnam War attests to what Lan P. Duong describes as an asymmetry of power relations and uneven access to culturemaking regarding the “Vietnam War discourse” (Treacherous 78).

Countering images of brutality and hypermasculinity featured in dominant representations of the Vietnam War, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (2017) weaves a tapestry of stories about the Vietnam War through memories of her mother and father and the births of her siblings and her son. Echoing Art Spiegelman’s assertion that “history [is] far too important to leave solely to the historians” (100), Bui reframes history, offering alternative narratives through the creative medium of comics. The Best We Could Do centers on Bui’s family and their experiences living in Viêt Nam during the war and the challenges they faced as they made their journey to the United States. Similar to GB Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010), Bui’s graphic novel examines how dominant accounts of the Vietnam War often overlook individuals whose lives are haunted by the traumatic legacy of war.⁴ While both graphic novelists narrate self-reflecting journeys that help them discover how the war affected their respective family’s complex histories and their own identities, Bui’s work offers a new perspective through which to see and narrate the Vietnam War, one that is not anchored in masculine bravado, guns, and violence. Through the lens of motherhood and birthing, Bui’s work brings together a constellation of memories of war and its impact on family and nation.

In The Best We Could Do, Bui depicts how individual and national bodies deliver new possibilities and spaces for alternative archives and political projects. I interrogate how the trauma of history informs the present and future and shapes subject formation. The “rich visual-verbal form of comics” provides a space for Bui to “revisit [her] pasts, retrace events, and literally repicture them” and “represent trauma productively and ethically” (Chute, Graphic 3), helping recuperate neglected, silenced, and unrecorded history, particularly of women during the war. Similar to how traumatic memories are recalled in fragments, Bui transitions between temporal moments of past and present and geographies of Viêt Nam, Malaysia, and the United States, disrupting teleological narratives of history, space, and time. Using topographies of displacement, The Best We Could Do speaks to war, migration, and refugee experiences. Bui structures her nonlinear narrative through the framework of birthing in which motherhood and the...