A beautifully illustrated and deeply moving graphic memoir about a Vietnamese family’s escape after the fall of Saigon.
The book, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui, published in 2017, is a critically acclaimed graphic memoir that traces the history of the author’s family as they flee South Việt Nam after the war in the 1970s and build a new life in the United States as refugees. The narrative is catalyzed by the author’s own experience of becoming a mother, prompting her to confront and reconstruct her parents’ traumatic pasts—her mother’s experiences during the war and her father’s difficult childhood shaped by violence and famine—in an effort to understand the inherited struggles of displacement, cultural identity, and intergenerational trauma. Interweaving her own memories with oral history interviews, Bui uses the medium of comics to explore the complex emotional costs of war and migration, ultimately offering a poignant tribute to family sacrifice and the enduring search for a sense of belonging and peace.