ABCD

 

When I first read about Thi Bui's immigrant experience it made me think of my family's own experiences in America. While my parent's immigration was largely a result of my father pursuing a master's education at USC, I feel that a lot of the experiences Thi Bui shared regarding how her family "assimilated" in America were similar to my own. 

When my parents first moved to America, they were lucky enough to live in an apartment complex where they were surrounded by many likewise Indian couples. I've heard various stories over the years about my parent's time there and their time with their friends. This community they had was so close to the point that my parent's still have a group chat with a lot of their neighbors and friends from that time. I found this similar to how when Thi Bui's family moved to America she lived with her mom's older sister. They taught and gave Thi Bui's family an opportunity to "modernize" by enrolling them in American schools, signing up her parents for an American education and learning English. Likewise, my mom's friends would take her shopping at the mall, teach her new American recipes and tell her about all the new opportunities she had in America. Like Thi Bui's mom, who used to be a teacher in Vietnam, my mom used to be a professor in India at a local college before she moved to America. Here her degrees were pretty much useless so my mom would take classes at local community colleges in and libraries for an American education. 

While Thi Bui's family moved from the northeast to California my family actually did the opposite. When I was about 4 my family moved from San Francisco, California to New York City for my dad's job. While my parents actually knew English before coming to America, they still had trouble navigating cultural barriers like driving and racism. In the book Thi Bui's mom often asks her neighbor for a ride to her kid's events. Similarly, my mom actually struggled a lot with driving since in India her family had a driver, so she never really had to practice driving. In San Francisco my dad had to pretty much force my mom to lock in and start driving so that she could get her essential tasks done like picking me and my sister up from daycare, going shopping etc. 

As immigrants my parent's struggled with assimilating and being seen as "Americans" an issue that I myself have also struggled with over the past years. Just like how Thi Bui can find intersecting parts of her identity surrounding being a Vietnamese refugee and American citizen my parents found intersectionality in their identities as indians and americans.

"The best we could do" thoughts

 On page 82 of The best we could do we see a panel on the bottom of the page showing a highway where on the right you can see darker dimmer cars but on the left cars are indistinguishable, but you can see a number of circles. Here Thi Bui writes about how one of the car lights is going to heaven and the other to hell. She imagines the two lanes as rivers with the left travelling upstream and the right downstream. The circles drawn on this page and use of water imagery was reminiscent of another panel to me. On page 123 of the book, we see Bo hiding from the soldiers below ground in a manhole. There is a picture with circles very similar to the ones we saw on page 82 and could show a connection between the two panels based off of how Bo is currently below ground in "hell" and how all of the people above ground (source of the light) are dying at the hands of the soldiers and going to "heaven". There is also the repeated imagery of water with the circles reflecting in the manhole where Bo is. There they are reflected as orange which signifies the blood that has fallen and infected the town with violence. The continuous use of water throughout the book also ties back into how Ma and Bo arrived in America as refugees on boats. The water represents a separation caused by larger geopolitical issues between the Vietnamese people and their government. Regardless of what government they are under (French, or communist) they are still oppressed and pushed into systemic poverty. This is further shown by how Bo has contradicting beliefs about the government. On page 207, Thi Bui is confused about whether or not Bo hates the general or is defending him. Both sides of Vietnam contributed to some degree in the killings of their own citizens, but the war was not black and white. Many of the conflicts and violence spurred as a result of earlier violence and killings perpetuating a cycle of violence and hate for the same purpose of liberating their citizens. Shown by how the image of the general killing a Viet Cong soldier was a result of the Viet Cong killing a family in their home earlier. This also directly juxtaposes with the next few panels on the page where Thi Bui describes the American propaganda pushed out where the Americans are the good guys and the communists are the bad guys. The Vietnam that Bo and Ma lived through becomes a caricature where these people are reduced to harmful stereotypes that only further perpetuates the racism against the same people America was trying to liberate. The hookers, corrupt leaders etc. are no longer people but they are stereotypes that can easily be hated. This kind of media and oversimplification allows for people to be rooted in hateful ideologies like the man that called Bo a slur when he was walking on the street. Despite the fact that America was the one that interjected itself in the war through "Domino theory" they can still be considered the good guys and not people who contributed to the deaths and violence against many Vietnamese people they get to be validated in "liberating and hating".