Meanwhile, Bui's mother (“Má”) grew up in privilege as a child of a civil engineer, shielded for many years from the dire conditions of much of the country. She records her father's traumatic, uprooted childhood in the 1950s (she calls him “Bố,” or “daddy”) and how he endured periods of living as a refugee with his abusive, philandering father in a country wracked with sociopolitical turmoil and poverty. It was shortly afterward that she began to record the family’s history, hoping that “if I bridged the gap between past and present… I could fill the void between my parents and me.” Her narrative flashes back and forth in time, illustrating how larger events (war, dictatorship, immigration) shaped the family’s lives. In her early twenties, Bui traveled back to Vietnam to meet her extended family.

The weight of this history informs the entire narrative, at times foregrounded but always present. Though her family survived calamitous events, the emotional scars and cultural confusion they carry as collateral damage are considerable, resulting in gaps in communication and misunderstandings between each generation’s parents and their children. Much of the subsequent narrative centers on the history of her mother, father, and siblings living in war-torn South Vietnam, then fleeing in 1978 when Bui was three. A wave of empathy for my mother washes over me.” Afterward, as Bui lies exhausted in her hospital bed, she realizes the impact of the event: “Family is now something I have created-and not just something I was born into. The Best We Could Do opens with the complicated, grueling birth of artist Thi Bui’s child in New York City in 2005.

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui