"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".