Bingo: Heart (themes of familial love)
What a lovely book. The Best We Could Do is a graphic novel by Thi Bui. It’s a story about her family. It starts with Thi giving birth to her son, and as she comes to terms with becoming a mother, she finds herself thinking about her relationships with her own parents and her childhood. From there, she explores her parents’ childhoods, how they met, their life in Viet Nam prior to and during the war, and their escape to the U.S. after the fall of Saigon.
Firstly, I learned a lot about the Viet Nam War from this book. I was born after the war, and most of what I know about it comes from movies–and those movies are centered on the experiences of American troops. Reading about the experiences of Thi Bui’s family was eye-opening.
Even more importantly, this story is an absolutely beautiful story about parenthood, family dynamics, and growing up and seeing your parents as people, not just parents. Bui does an absolutely incredible job with this. She starts off showing you just a little of her parents–basically showing you what a child of theirs would see. Then she slowly peels back the layers, and explores their lives, in a way that rounds them out so beautifully. It’s similar to the actual experience of realizing your parents are individuals with a whole life that happened before and around you–first you learn the childhood stories they tell you when you are a child, then as you grow you start piecing together more of the story.
I think maybe that’s the theme of the whole book–there’s more to the story than we think. There’s more to the Viet Nam War than what American citizens were led to believe, or choose to believe. There’s more to someone’s parenting style than conscious choices and personality traits. There’s more to another person than we can ever really understand.