However, Bui understands her father as she explores his story, what he has survived and the damage it’s done to his thoughts and emotions. There’s a sadness throughout, the kind of sorrow that comes from recognizing parents as human beings, and from hearing stories that we know we cannot fully understand.īui’s father, for example, starts out as an unsympathetic character-he could easily be dismissed as a man who accidentally terrorized his children and emotionally abandoned his wife. It is instead poetic, slow-moving, nuanced, and compassionate. Unlike Maus, this is not a sardonic and self-effacing graphic memoir. In the manner of Spiegelman’s Maus, this book tells Bui’s parents’ stories and intermingles their traumatic histories with Bui’s and her sisters’ life in America. The Best We Could Do is a family memoir, describing how writer/artist Bui’s family came to the United States soon after the end of the Vietnam War. It grounds the overwhelming in the relatable, making what could be an alien story universal, and salvaging a dark history with the insights that only close family can provide. An important addition to the graphic memoir genre, this book tells its story of birth, war, trauma, alienation, and love entirely in personal terms. We can see that what the world sees as Disaster and History, individual families see as Life. In Thi Bui’s graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, disaster is foundational and unavoidable as well, but is also intensely personal. In her book Why Comics? Hillary Chute states flatly that the foundation of comics is in disaster-Spiegelman’s Holocaust, Jimmy Corrigan’s family, the destruction of Krypton.
0 kommentar(er)
