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Jana K. Lipman, Deceptively “Easy”: Analyzing Images, Memory, and Methods in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 122–126, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae654
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The book begins in a hospital in New York City; the first illustration is a tightly cropped image of a woman in labor, the frame drawing attention to her pregnant stomach, medical tubing, and spread legs. In the next panel, her husband stands beside her, but the text and the images spotlight an empty chair. Her mother has “disappeared.” Despite traveling across the country to assist, she “can’t bear to be in the same room” as her daughter1 (1–2). Thi Bui’s graphic memoir The Best We Could Do opens with this explicit childbirth scene, as it sets the stage for an immersive meditation on the fraught relationship between parents and their children, and on the consequences of colonialism and war across generations. The Best We Could Do’s powerful drawings and nonlinear narrative have seeped into my writing on refugee camps and provoked questions about historical method and form.2 It has also become a go-to book in my courses on the US War in Vietnam and US immigration history.
