thi bui the best we could do an illustrated memoir

In the book, while lying exhausted in her hospital bed gazing at her sleeping son, she muses, “Family is something now I have created – and not just something I was born into.” Motherhood brings new urgency to her need to remember, understand, empathize … and, ultimately, make peace with the tumultuous events of her brief childhood in Vietnam and the challenges of adjusting to life as refugees and later as Americans.Ī year after her son’s New York birth, Bui reunites her extended family, resettling everyone in Berkeley, California, where her mother will become the fourth resident in their home and her father will be just four blocks away. She eventually chose The Best We Could Do when she “realized that the book was about parents and children.”īecoming a mother herself in 2005 altered Bui’s sense of family, especially her relationship with her own mother – who birthed six children, an experience Bui can’t fathom after surviving the birth of her first (and only) child. She tried and discarded various titles, from Buis in Vietnam America: A Memory Reconstruction to Refugee Reflex which “sound an awful lot like ‘reflux,’” Bui jokes.

The “seeds of this book,” Bui writes in her Preface, “were planted around 2002.” Multiple mediums initially included a “clumsy homemade book” to a “pretty academic” text-and-visuals project before she settled on the comics approach – without any previous training. Between starred reviews, accolades, and growing buzz about awards and prizes since its March debut, Bui may soon enough be joining her compatriot Nguyen on podiums and stages. While the narrative might feel familiar – parents and young children escaping war to start a new life on the other side of the world – Bui’s version, presented in panels of black, white, and shades of reddish brown (as if she’s melded her very bones and blood onto the page), proves astonishingly original. On the cover of Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir is a perfect quote: “A book to break our heart and heal it,” blurbs fellow Vietnamese American refugee and 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction Viet Thanh Nguyen. Q&A with Thi Bui: Writer, Illustrator, Teacher

Thi bui the best we could do an illustrated memoir