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Review 32: The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

The Best We Could Do
The first thing you notice, upon slotting a copy of The Best We Could Do into your greedy, sweaty little hands, is the texture of the dust jacket. It’s gently rough, and feels a little like the book’s bound in human skin. This is odd, but feels very appropriate for a graphic novel that’s all about the human experience. It personifies its own story.

Thi Bui’s graphic memoir recounts the lives of her siblings, her parents and her grandparents as they navigate the political turmoil in Vietnam. I’ll be calling it Vietnam in this review, rather than the more correct Viêt Nam, because I’m writing this on a train and it’s really hard to do the little circumflex over the e.

The events and political shifts that preceded, occurred during and followed the Vietnam war are explored, but through the eyes of Bui’s relatives and the human effect it has on them. As always, I’m as ignorant about the Vietnam war as a short stack of pancakes, but this feels like it gives another perspective to the one commonly seen in our media and textbooks.

It’s not a simple picture that she paints. It becomes clear that neither US-endorsed South Vietnam nor theoretically-Communist North Vietnam are actually in control of their own destiny, and something that would get the local population lauded one day could get them beaten and killed the next. Bui doesn’t provide moral guidance here – instead, she shows how the country’s status as a political jumping jack means that the Vietnamese people always lost out.

One clear example of this is discussion of the famous Sai Gon execution. The general holding the gun summarily executes a Viet Cong fighter. This picture is commonly held up as a turning point in Western attitudes to the war, seeing the regime their troops were supporting show such callous disregard for human life. But the Viet Cong man he is shooting had himself just massacred a family of people in their own home. So who was right, and who was wrong? There’s no easy answer, other than that the atmosphere of violence and volatility was untenable for all.

Artistically, TBWCD is smooth and assured. It’s done almost entirely in sweeps of charcoal blacks and greys, with a simplicity that belies its subject matter. I feel like the book may have benefited from a more lush style, to more clearly delineate the environments, since these are so important to the book, which covers shifts from North Vietnam, to South Vietnam, to New York, to California. But this is quibbling.

The book has garnered various comparisons to Persepolis, understandably. But where Persepolis is about changes across a single generation, and the resistance to that, TBWCD focuses more on the long-term effects of political shifts as they trickle down the family tree.

It’s a fascinating book about family and emotional inheritance. You don’t need to come to it with special knowledge of Vietnam, but I’m sure that everyone would leave it with an enriched one.

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