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Tribune News Service

 The Best We Could Do
by Thi Bui
Abrams
4 stars
Thi Bui’s graphic novel about her family’s exodus from Vietnam begins in New York, where she is giving birth to her son – a tiny, jaundiced mite who has a “faraway face with old man eyes”. Over the next few days, as she struggles to breastfeed and care for the newborn, “a terrifying thought creeps into my head,” she writes. “Family is now something I have created.”

And family – complicated, difficult, sometimes tragic family – is at the heart of this intense and moving memoir. Bui is the narrator and only occasionally a character in the book, which focuses on her parents – their upbringing in Vietnam, their escape to the United States, their difficult life there.
We learn a sweeping, terrible history – the French occupation, the war, the stark division of the country, the rising power of the communists, the brutality of the regime, the dangerous exodus of citizens – but always she brings it back to an intimate level. Politics are skimmed over; what is important are the bewildered people, trying to survive as their world changes and threatens them.

“I keep looking toward the past,” Bui writes, “tracing our journey in reverse, over the ocean, through the war, seeking an origin story that will set everything right.”
The details she records are unforgettable: a famished mother and son devouring a bit of sausage. A boy hiding underwater from soldiers until he nearly drowns. The starved dead piled up in handcarts to be hauled away.
Bui recounts how her father grew up impoverished in the countryside, with moments of joy punctuated by hunger and fear. Bui’s mother, Má, came from wealth but had a mother who was imperious and ice-cold.
Book review: the bloodiest Vietnam war battle, Hue, 1968 – a searing account of courage and cowardice
“I hated it when my mother hit the servants,” Má recalls. “But she hit her children, too. We were all terrified of her.”

In well-chosen words and black-and-white drawings splashed with a fiery orange wash, Bui tells this fierce story. As the book unfolds, she begins to see her parents in a new light, as people who have endured unimaginable hardship and are doing the best they can. And yet the story is devoid of sentimentality.
The Stolen Bicycle: Wu Ming-yi expertly weaves a narrative of Taiwan
Memoir is a fast-morphing genre, nearly as elastic in form as the novel. Memoirs are told in photographs and in poems, in chronological narratives and in text that meanders in time and place.
Memoirs told in comic-book style, such as this one, are growing more popular. Bui’s is the most moving you will see this year: passionate, intimate, tackling huge themes – love, war, history, emigration – while focused intensely on one family.
If you want to better understand the history and scope of the Vietnam war, if you want to understand what immigrants have endured, and continue to endure, you can start with no better book.


Review: the most moving memoir you will read this year, Thi Bui’s graphic novel The Best We Could Do depicts the pain of migration

A frame from The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui. Photo: Courtesy of Abrams Books

This handout image shows book cover "The Best We Could Do" by Thi Bui [25SEPTEMBER2017 BOOKS] Courtesy of ABRAMS Books

This handout image shows An excerpt of "The Best We Could Do" by Thi Bui [25SEPTEMBER2017 BOOKS] Courtesy of ABRAMS Books

This handout image shows author Thi Bui who was born in Vietnam three months before the end of the Vietnam War, and immigrated to the US with her family in 1978. She is the author of The Best We Could Do (Abrams, March 2017) [25SEPTEMBER2017 BOOKS] Photo by Gabe Clark

Author’s death rekindles obscenity debate in South Korea

South Korean author Ma Kwang-soo, who wrote the controversial novel Happy Sara about a sexually adventurous college student, was found dead in his home on September 5.

--- LOW RESOLUTION ---- This Youtube screen capture shows the cover of Happy Sara15SEP17 [FEATURES] Photo : Handout

Culture

Books

Author tells the story of her family’s exodus from Vietnam to the US, and her country’s sweeping, terrible history, in unforgettable, intimate detail


Author Thi Bui tells the story of her family’s exodus from Vietnam to the US, and her country’s sweeping, terrible history, in unforgettable, intimate detail


An assessment or critique of a service, product or creative endeavour.  Film reviews, restaurant reviews, reviews of art exhibitions. (Eg. Crazy Rich Asians: an important film, yes, but a good one?)


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Author tells the story of her family’s exodus from Vietnam to the US, and her country’s sweeping, terrible history, in unforgettable, intimate detail

Author tells the story of her family’s exodus from Vietnam to the US, and her country’s sweeping, terrible history, in unforgettable, intimate detail