The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir

I loved this book. I devoured the entire thing in one sitting on a Sunday afternoon. It's a beautiful and tragic and warm story all at the same time. I feel like a lot of times when we hear about the Vietnam war in the United States, it's told from the perspective of American soldiers rather than the Southern Vietnamese who lost their home land. Really refreshing to see this diverse and nuanced perspective. I look forward to Thi Bui's future works.

As soon as I finished the first scene of The Best We Could Do my lips started to tremble. I knew I was in for it. This book is uniquely evocative of a time, a place and experience that many of us refugees assume is normal. It’s not normal, even if it’s a familiar refugee experience. I’m a new mom, born the same year as the author in Saigon, and we escaped on a boat one year after her family did. This book hit really close to home. Reading about the Vietnamese experience in the form of a comic book strips the experience down to its bare roots. And those roots are complex, rough, and beautiful. The Best We Could Do is an absolute treasure. I know what I’ll be giving to my closest friends this year for Christmas. Those who read it will understand the Vietnamese experience more deeply. Thanks to Bill Gates for recommending this book among his top 5 for 2017 reads!

I first learned about this book only a week ago when visiting my sister for Thanksgiving in Eugene, Oregon. We went to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art where I saw some work on display by the author, and there was a copy of her book available to look at, so I perused through and decided to buy it and read it. I'm so glad that I did! This is an incredible, poetic story that spans four generations, multiple wars and conflicts, and examines the fragility of the author's relationship with her parents and with her sense of place and motherhood. This book is one of the best I've read in a long time, and the art is moving and beautiful. It gave me new insight into the struggles of refugee life, and created a truly relatable narrative. I devoured this story in one Saturday. I highly recommend it.

I got this for my Ethnic Studies class and was eager to read a graphic novel and call it homework. While not as thoroughly covered as other material I studied in class this was still fascinating to sit down and read. Thi Bui writes a memoir of her life from when she gave birth to her son. With memories of her labor as the first thing she then begins to question her mortality, via the life and times of those closest to her, specifically her family. Thi Bui had lived her life in a good home but via a strange series of incidents that make it less than ideal. In time she realizes that it’s her parents’ trauma via having endured what can truly be called even worse than less than ideal, outright abusive. But I guess that’s what happens when you live two decades of war. World War II, the Indochina War, and the Vietnam War. Nam Bui and Hang Troung endured life via war in a country that had endured ages of colonial rule, and fierce nationalistic movements, all the while trying to live their lives. But despite all the abuse they endured, whether from bad parents, a country at war, miscarriages, and doing their best to make it alive after the final war’s end as refugees to America. Truly living up to the adage of doing “The Best We Could,” so that their children would live a better life. My class studied the Vietnamese/Indochina experience in our Ethnic Studies class, I’ve also read and watched a lot about the Vietnam War, and I have a great respect for the people who endured a cause that most Americans refuse to acknowledge. I especially found the art, while not as realistic at times, was still complex, giving a realistic vibe while presenting it in a simplified form. There was a lot of depth and range that came from the art, and it tells the story very well. Many compliments to the author for sharing such a great story of her life and her family.

I loved the raw depictions of vietnamese history and human emotions. I recommend this book to anyone experiencing intergenerational trauma. 5 stars, this book helped me understand my father and mother just a little more, and that is priceless

Stories like this and Grave Of The Fireflies show is the dark side of war, although this story is not so sad. You can see the everyday struggles of war and its effect on day to day life throughout the story. It is also a personal story. So there are bittersweet moments too and it has that slice-of-life angle which makes it very relatable/understandable to read. The artwork is also very distinct and unique and I love it for that. This graphic novel also gave me insights into Vietnam war and left me curious for more details. I’ll definitely recommend this a “must read”.

Riveting reading. The illustrations complement the honest no-frills text beautifully. Well worth the read. I had the privilege of being the author’s Uber driver to the airport when she visited Perth . Chatting to her I learnt about this graphic novel she’d written over a 10 year labour of love, so I wanted to buy a copy to read. A wonderful and informative traumatic family history, excellent read!

reçu à temps et dans le même état que promis.

Muy buen servicio

I've read this as an e-book on my Note Air 3C. This is a very special, very personal story. As far as I understood, it's the personal story of the author's family. Even though it is a graphic novel and may sometimes look like a childs comics, and even there are children in this story, it is far from being for children. It is a story of a family in a war-ridden country called Viet Nam. I'm not american so Viet Nam isn't part of the history of my country, but because the US produces movies and other fiction about its war there and exports it to the rest of the world, I did have a picture in my mind about the country and the war. Now this book delivers a view of the people who actually lived and live there, but the fascinating thing is that it isn't written by someone who really grew up there. Instead, it's the viewpoint of a person who only has vague memories about the childhood in Viet Nam. Thi Bui is only 2 years older than me, so she clearly can't remember 1978 when her family made the escape from Viet Nam. The book explains the backstory of her parents, beginning with their childhood and how they met, how they got their children, how the war and the communist terror that followed it, forced them to leave. That is the one side of this novel. The other is the persons they have become because of it, and the way they deal with it, and how their children live with them. A father who is traumatized and often alien, a mother who is very demanding. It's the story of how the author learns to understand why they are how they are. All of this is presented in beautiful, simple, easy to understand pictures that look like images and have very little color. They look like sketches. Personally I loved them. Even on the E Ink tablet they looked terrific. This book is about the difficult sides of live and mankind. War, torture, alienated families, abortion, racism, being a foreigner, having to adapt to a foreign culture, not knowing about your origins and so on. The terror of the communist regime is displayed in few simple sketches but blows away any romantic illusions you may have had about it on the previous pages (because the book DOES show how a small group of land owners and french invaders lived feudal lives while most of the rest had little to nothing). It is a book that is worth reading and I enjoyed it, even though it is very tough to swallow at some points.

Read this for a university English class. One of my favourites that semester!