Thi Bui’s family memoir and graphic novel “The Best We Could Do” seems to have been written to answer one singular question the author has carried their whole life, “Why am I this way?” It doesn’t seem to have a positive or negative connotation, but rather the curiosity of someone who doesn’t feel at home. To answer this central question, Bui spends some time investigating her own life, but far more delving into her family’s history, going back as far as her paternal great-grandfather.

The book contains a multitude of comparisons and contrasts among the author and her parents, from directly addressing why she has a hard time investigating her mother, “Writing about my mother is harder for me, maybe because my image of her is so tied up with my opinions of myself,” (131) to less directly saying the second generation is “lame” (29). There are times when the author even stops telling a story about her parents, and begins telling from their point of view.

The investigation Bui made into her family began shortly after a 2001 family visit to the city where she was born in Vietnam. Writing about the vacation, Bui says that while her elder sisters were able to recount specific memories from their childhood, she, only three years-old when the family fled, and her younger brother “documented [the vacation] in lieu of remembering.” (182)  In the illustrations of this section of the book, Bui has a blank expression and a camera. I’m familiar with the look on her face, I’ve felt it before when I’ve seen something or been in a situation which I knew should mean more  to me, but couldn’t conjure the feelings within myself. Taking into account this strange feeling of loss, it’s no wonder Bui sought out a sense of remembering through the experiences of her family.

What is ”Family” to Bui? The first instance of the word in this novel, as Bui is gazing at her newborn son, is spelled in all-caps, “FAMILY is now something I have created, not just something I was born into.”(21) Later in that chapter, a caption at the top of a page reads, “These are the people I come from.” The following two tiers are labeled illustrations of first her parents and then the author and her siblings. At the bottom of the page the illustration is of the author standing with her husband, Travis, and their son between them, with both parents looking at their child, with the caption, “I’ve figured out more or less how to raise my little family.”(29) These are two instances provide the reader with the author’s definition of family using two distinct. The first is that in both quoted instances of the use of family the author is referring to her son, explicitly in the first case and by implication of the focus of the figures in the second. Family wasn’t created by love, or by marriage, but by birth. The second and supporting clue as to what family is in this novel is the phrasing of, “These are the people I come from.” These are the people I come from, these are the people who made me who I am, these are the ones who influenced my decisions; the inclusion of every immediate blood relative and no one else secures the definition of family as blood.

In my opinion the rigidity of the idea that one must accept all blood relatives as part of their family and, by extension, part of themselves, in conjunction with Vietnamese diaspora were what led to at least some portion of the isolation and feeling of loss Bui experienced on the family trip in 2001. Cut off from an immense source of what could have been personal identity in Vietnam by distance and in the United States by traditionalism and strict parenting, Bui was left yearning for herself. Though she eventually moved to New York in 1999 with then boyfriend Travis, they moved back in 2006, a year after the birth of their son, “trading the life we had built and loved in New York for a notion I had in my head of becoming closer to my parents as an adult.”(31) Though Bui had had space and time enough to find herself somewhat, there was still something missing, and that missing piece couldn’t be found without returning to the source; the people who made her.