Refugees In Thi Bui's Memoir, The Best We Could Do

The decision to leave one’s native country is a result of a wide variety of push factors, where war is no exception. Refugees have a unique migration experience, as seen through the Vietnamese refugees of the 1960s and 1970s. The traumas that refugees live in their war-torn home countries follows and integrates into their everyday lives, even years following their flee. Specifically, refugees’ experiences and distress persist and influence family dynamics. Evident in Thi Bui’s memoir, The Best We Could Do, she shares not only what her family’s refugee journey was like from Vietnam to the United States, but also the implications it had on her family’s relationship. Bui uses medias res, symbolism, and graphic weight to show how the turmoil of

On page one, Bui begins her memoir with the following words: : “I’m in labor. The pain comes in twenty-foot waves and Ma has disappeared.” As readers, we are propelled into Bui’s birth labor, though considering that it is a refugee memoir, it might be expected to have began with Bui’s childhood in Vietnam. Instead Bui begins her story in “New York Methodist Hospital November 28, 2005”(1). Consequently, the manipulation of time at the beginning of the book functions to convey how the sentiments of the refugee journey continue to influence her family’s relationship even in adulthood. The medias res’ sudden quality, the strong physical pain that is conveyed, and the loneliness of this opening scene parallels with the cumulative feeling of Bui’s refugee experience, which is also sudden, painful, and in many times,

An explicit example of how Bui uses graphic weight to illustrate the strained relationship between parent and child, is on page 59, where she is self-portrayed with a solemn face and darkness behind her and over her head. The darkness in this page’s panel is a visual representation of how despite that Bui’s “parents took [the children] far away from the site of their grief certain shadows stretched far, casting a gray stillness over [their] childhood”(“The Best We Could Do,” 59). The panel above is light in color where Bui is with her parents in her home, almost completely happy, as represented in the light graphic weight. The differences in graphic weight reveals the fact that war possesses a generational impact from its direct victims all the way to their children. Little did the United States know the impact its involvement in Vietnam would have on families for years to come, as the war was both a literal and symbolic “war for liberation”(Liu, Geron, and Lai