Contemporary Authors

• The Best We Could Do ( graphic memoir) Abrams ComicArts (New York, NY), 2017

1. The best we could do LCCN 2016940170 Type of material Book Personal name Bui, Thi. Main title The best we could do / Thi Bui. Published/Produced New York, NY : Abrams ComicArts, 2017. Projected pub date 1703 Description pages cm ISBN 9781419718779 (hardcover) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available.

• Blogger - https://www.blogger.com/profile/10725214622904234381

  I was born in Saigon, raised in California and schooled in New York. I teach high school. I have a little boy and a husband. I have been hard at work, writing and drawing a graphic novel called THE BEST WE COULD DO. It is a 15-chapter immigration epic about my parents, their place in history, and my search for my place in my family.

• California College of Arts - https://www.cca.edu/academics/faculty/tbui

  THI BUI
  Thi Bui profile image
  Thi Bui is completing her graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, which will be published by Abrams ComicArts in Fall 2016. Thi was born in Vietnam three months before the end of the Vietnam War, and came to the U.S. as one of the refugee "boat people" of the Seventies. She studied Art and Legal Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and received an MFA in Sculpture from Bard College and a Masters in Art Education from New York University. She is a founding teacher of Oakland International High School, where she edited and published teenagers' immigrant stories told as comics, and taught them to make their own movies. Her comics work has been published in The Asian American Literary Review, Hyphen Magazine, and History as Art, Art as History: Contemporary Art and Social Studies Education (Routledge, 2010), and featured in APAture 2015 and by the Museums of Los Gatos.

  More on Thi Bui's work can be found at:

  The Nerds of Color

  http://thenerdsofcolor.org/2015/10/06/apature2015-interview-with-thi-bui/

  and

  APEX Express

  https://kpfa.org/episode/apex-express-october-8-2015/

• NBC News - http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/best-we-could-do-thi-bui-honors-family-s-immigration-n726626

  Quoted in Sidelights: Suddenly I had so much empathy for my parents because I was finally a parent myself,”
  “I wrote it from a place of empathy and trying to understand my parents as human beings rather than as just my parents. I’m hoping that translates to readers. This political discourse around immigration is so divisive, and I’m hoping that this story and where it was made from will remind people just to empathize.

  ‘The Best We Could Do’: Thi Bui Honors Family’s Immigration Story in Debut Graphic Novel
  by CARLY LANNING

  Cover art for "The Best We Could Do," an illustrated memoir by Thi Bui. Courtesy of ABRAMS Books
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  Before she began to work on her graphic novel in 2007, Thi Bui had never drawn a comic in her life. Now, 10 years later, she'll debut her family's story through an illustrated memoir already being praised by literary heavyweights, such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Viet Thanh Nguyen.

  Thi Bui, the author and artist behind "The Best We Could Do" Gabe Clark
  "The Best We Could Do," scheduled to be released in March, centers around Bui and her family’s immigration to the United States during the Vietnam War. Through narration that alternates between the present — in which Bui is pregnant with her son — and the past, she illustrates the rippling effects displacement and war have throughout generations. At the core of the story, Bui illustrates the evolving relationships between parents and children and, after having her son, discovering what it really means to be a mother.

  Bui spoke to NBC News about the challenges of writing about family, the benefits of publishing her first novel later in life, and how readers can help empower immigrant voices within art and literature.

  How did “The Best We Could Do” originally begin? And through the 10 years you worked on this, what kept you going?

  It started with the family stories I grew up around. I understood them very much as a kid, but these stories were from another country and my parent’s generation.

  By the time I got to grad school, I was really interested in recording them as an oral history. I compiled them for my master’s thesis and tried to present them in a way that had lots of photographs and visuals, but it’s still pretty academic. I felt like I wanted to make it work for a general audience and I was really inspired by some graphic novels I was reading at the time, like “Maus” by Art Spiegelman and “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi.

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  But I hadn’t done comics before so it took me a long time to actually get good enough at comics. I learned to do comics by working on this book, which is a terrible way to learn any new medium. I had to draw a lot of bad pages before making something that felt right.

  Then the other thing that changed for me soon after grad school was I became a parent myself. I think that was the major shift that made me feel like all this material I had been sitting on for such a long time, I could actually turn into a story. Suddenly I had so much empathy for my parents because I was finally a parent myself.

  After working with your parents for so long on this story, when you finally showed them the final piece, were you nervous?

  That would have been really nerve-wracking for sure! But the lucky thing is that my mom lives in my backyard and my dad lives four blocks away.

  That sort of happened while I was working on the book and that was also around the time that I realized the book was about parents and children. The name changed from “Refugee Reflex,” which I was never totally happy with, to “The Best We Could Do.”

  An excerpt of "The Best We Could Do" by Thi Bui Courtesy of ABRAMS Books
  Around this time I was shifting a lot of my life around so I could fit both my aging parents into it. This made it really easy to show them drafts of the book as I was drawing it. They would remember more stuff or they would correct me or realize there was stuff I didn’t know how to draw. We had a lot of back and forth all throughout the book, and I like to think they had veto power the whole time.

  Right now with everything happening in politics, the immigrant experience is something that’s on the forefront of a lot of people’s minds. What do you hope your experience and this book inspires in other people?

  I wrote it from a place of empathy and trying to understand my parents as human beings rather than as just my parents. I’m hoping that translates to readers. This political discourse around immigration is so divisive, and I’m hoping that this story and where it was made from will remind people just to empathize. They’re human beings just like everybody else and I hope that will cut through and remind people that these are human beings we’re talking about, not “others.”

  An excerpt of "The Best We Could Do" by Thi Bui Courtesy of ABRAMS Books
  What is your writing and drawing routine like?

  I’m all over the place! I would like to say I have a really solid studio practice but I just come up with these things that I want to do and then I plan backwards to see how I can get to them.

  I know I have to do a whole book so then I break it down into chapters. Then I try to break the chapters down into stages, and then I go back. I don’t have a really good starting point. It’s all, what do I want to make and what do I need to know in order to make it? Then I teach myself the skills. It’s a little reckless, but it works out, more or less.

  What advice would you have for other artists, especially those who might be pursuing art later on in their career and also balancing a full-time job and being a parent?

  I don’t think it’s ever too late, and I’m actually enjoying being older as this is happening.

  It’s sort of like I get to have a writer life now and before that I had an educator life and a parent life and a "young artist in New York" life. I’ve gotten to have all these different versions of my life, and you have your failures and successes in all of them. But I think now this is helping me feel pretty relaxed about it and that I’ve gotten through the hard part.

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  If making a book is like having a kid, I have at least one kid with a reputation as a heartbreaker. https://twitter.com/abramsbooks/status/832755511439327232 …
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  In producing a memoir, how do you balance being protective of your family’s story with sharing an honest version of your narrative?

  “This political discourse around immigration is so divisive, and I’m hoping that this story, and where it was made from, will remind people just to empathize.”
  I had to portray them as whole human beings, which meant not showing them as being totally perfect.

  I think my mom has a hard time with that because she’s used to you just putting your best self forward. But I think both of my parents see themselves within a bigger picture, and they want Vietnamese stories to be told, so they’re put that priority in front of their own egos. They’ve given me permission to tell the story the way I think the story needs to be told.

  At the same time, memoir is funny because you think you’ve revealed everything, but as anyone who’s written a memoir has said, you’ve probably kept as much back as you’ve shown. I haven’t shared everything, but I’ve shared enough to tell the story I wanted to tell.

  After reading this book, how can we as readers continue to empower more immigrant voices and Asian-American voices in art and literature?

  Find the names that don’t end up on all of the book lists. I’ve noticed that there is a tendency to want to stick with all favorite authors, but I think it might do everybody a greater service to talk about newer authors. This way we keep moving forward instead of bringing in the same ones over and over again.

  There are so many new authors that I can’t keep up with all of the books that I buy and I think that I just need to shut myself in for a week so I can actually read everyone’s book all the way through. There is a lot of great work being made so I think it’s just shifting your idea of great books to books about things you don’t know about yet.

  What are you going to be working on next?

  The next thing I want to really dig into is climate change in Vietnam.

  It’s a nonfiction book where I’ll be traveling to Vietnam to do a lot of the primary research, but right now I’m talking to some folks at Cornell who are studying the area where I’m interested — the Mekong Delta. This area grows half the rice for the whole country, and they also export a lot. But it’s only six feet above sea level and the sea is rising every year so by the year 2050 the entire area is going to be underwater. This displaces around a million people.

  An excerpt of "The Best We Could Do" by Thi Bui Courtesy of ABRAMS Books
  Farmers are already dealing with the salt water coming it and ruining their crops so they have to figure out other ways to make a living — sometimes rice farming and sometimes shrimp farming. I heard some of them have gone out and blown up the sea walls to let the salt water in faster so they can just shrimp farm all year long. It’s like some apocalyptic stuff happening out there.

  Here, climate change denial keeps getting deeper and deeper so I just want to go somewhere where there is no climate change denial and people are actually having to deal with it. Also because I’ve been writing about Vietnam’s past for so long, it will be really nice to look at it in the present and think about its future.

  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

• CBR - http://www.cbr.com/the-best-we-could-do-thi-bui-interview/

  Quoted in Sidelights: The stories ballooned into a really massive oral history project,. Once I collected it, I realized that the next problem to figure out was how to present it. … At the same time, I started reading some really seminal graphic novels like Maus by Art Spiegelman and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Because I could write and I could draw, I figured maybe I could do a graphic novel.
  “a non-Vietnamese-American audience
  a small act of defiance against the English language”
  “I wanted to name them the way they’re actually named,”

  Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do Already Among Comics’ Best Memoirs
  05.18.2017
  by Alex Dueben
  in Comic News
  Comment (1)
  Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do Already Among Comics’ Best Memoirs

  Thi Bui’s new graphic memoir The Best We Could Do is a stunning book. It opens in a hospital room as Bui gives birth to her son, and then jumps around time as she tries to understand her parents’ lives, which are epic in scope, and her own.

  Bui covers the Vietnam War, what happened after the fall of Sai Gon, and what made her parents decide to escape the country. With other families, they got on a boat, and when the captain became incapacitated, Bui’s father learned how to pilot the ship. Navigated by the stars, he guiding them to Malaysia, in what must be one of the tensest and most suspenseful sequences in comics this year. She talks about life in the refugee camps, and the joys and the hatred that they encountered when they moved to the United States.

  Newsweek called The Best We Could Do, out now from Abrams ComicArts, “one of the books that will make 2017 interesting,” and cartoonists, writers and scholars who have praised the book for the ways that Bui manages to combine the personal and political, detailing the lives of three generations in a way that pulls no punches. It is a beautiful, heartbreaking book that has earned the right to mentioned in the same breath as other legendary comics memoirs like Maus and Persepolis and Fun Home. It’s a story that is more timely than ever given our current political climate and the anti-immigrant hysteria that some have stirred up.

  As Bui put it in an interview with CBR, “I have a dream of how I would like America to be. It’s one in which I don’t have to defend my right to exist.”

  CBR: You talk a little about this in the book, but I wonder if you could start just by talking a little about how the book began.

  Thi Bui: It began as an oral history. I have parents who talked very freely about Viet Nam and our family history and politics. It’s always been part of what I know, but when you sit down to record a story and make sense of it you realize how much you don’t know. The stories ballooned into a really massive oral history project. Once I collected it, I realized that the next problem to figure out was how to present it. Traditional oral history can be a bit dry and I knew that just having transcripts even with photographs wasn’t going to convey even ten percent of the emotional story.

  At the same time, I started reading some really seminal graphic novels like Maus by Art Spiegelman and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Because I could write and I could draw, I figured maybe I could do a graphic novel. Of course, that was arrogant thinking. [Laughs] I had to take a long time to actually learn the medium of comics. That’s part of why it took so long. The other reason it took so long was I had a baby and I moved across the country and I helped start a brand new school for recent immigrants and English language learners in Oakland, California. I was writing the book on the side, so it wasn’t until I took a break from high school teaching two and a half years ago that I was able to devote myself to the book and finish it.

  So it took a decade, but it sounds like you spent most of that time learning how to tell the story more than anything.

  I’m not a traditional cartoonist, in the sense that I didn’t start knowing how to do comics and then told the story. I learned how to do comics by telling the story. Which is something that a lot of people who teach comics advise against — because it’s hard. I’ve always been trying to tell stories but I didn’t know that. I was in an MFA program at Bard College in sculpture, and I kept getting in trouble for making work that people said was too narrative. At some point I wised up and realized, maybe I need to change the medium.

  You mentioned Maus and Persepolis, but did you have a model for what you wanted this book to be?

  No. I only had things that I didn’t want it to be like, which can be useful, too! [Laughs] When I grew up my family would watch every single Vietnam War movie that came out, hoping that maybe this would be the one that tells the story properly. We were always disappointed, of course. Sometimes more than disappointed. At some point I had to write the story that I had always wanted to read.

  You said that your parents talked about a lot of this with you, but I got the impression that the process of making the book really brought you and your father closer.

  Definitely.

  How much of his story did you know before starting this project?

  I knew bits and pieces. The process of trying to fit it all together into a chronology forced us to have a lot of conversations. We’re dealing with very early memories and moving back and forth in a really chaotic time. We’re also dealing with trauma. I realized that I had certain times in my life that I couldn’t remember because I had blocked them out in order to keep functioning. It was a process of digging into his early memories to try to create a narrative that made sense.

  Your father is an amazing man, and the way your mother describes him is very striking but you have this very scene where you’re describing your childhood fears and then speaking about your father: “I had no idea that the terror I felt was only the long shadow of his own.”

  I don’t think I would have been able to say that — or think that — before having a child. One of the reasons why I sat on a lot of the material was because there was a shift that happened in me that made me feel like I could possibly do justice to the stories. Shifting from being a child to being responsible for someone else and realizing that it’s a huge responsibility and how does anybody not screw this up. [Laughs]

  In the book you really convey how giving birth is this moment of love but it’s also traumatic and these things are linked.

  I guess I do present childbirth as a pretty traumatic thing, don’t I? [Laughs] The nice thing is, like my mother says, you do forget. There’s a lot of good stuff that follows. I guess I find American culture tends to put a lot of emphasis on the individual. Living in America there’s a lot of kids moving away from home and parents going into nursing homes and your own kids growing up and rebelling against you. It’s a bit lonely because everybody’s on their own. On the other hand, there’s a lot of freedom and you get to do what you want. So you’re free of the inter-generational living together annoyances that I hint at in my book.

  I guess maybe the only other model that I’ve ever heard of that sounds right would be a Native American respect for the elders who took care of the world before you and passed it to you and you’re moving through the world borrowing it from future generations. There’s an interconnectedness there and historical perspective where you’re not so lonely, you’re part of a trajectory. I think it makes people feel more responsible but also less alone.

  How did you decide on the title, The Best We Could Do?

  I went through some bad titles. The working title for a while was “Refugee Reflex” and then it was “Reflex” — but I knew it was bad because it sounds a lot like “Reflux.” Around the time I was rearranging my life and building a place in the backyard for my mom and finding a place nearby for my dad. I was adjusting how I had been living to make room for my parents in it. I guess that voluntary giving up some of my independence made me realize the book was as much about parents and children as it was about Viet Nam. In the story of Viet Nam — at least in the 20th Century — there was a yearning for independence and self-determination. That’s not that different from the yearning for independence and self-determination that you feel as you’re growing up and moving away from your parents.

  Your parents don’t have the life they would have ever imagined for themselves when they were young.

  Everything has been a series of adjustments to circumstances.

  People who read this will notice the place names. You don’t write “Viet Nam” as one word for example. Could you talk a little about why for people who don’t know?

  That was my small act of defiance against the English language. I wanted to write for a non-Vietnamese-American audience, but I also wanted to write for people like myself and like my parents’ generation. For people who can read Vietnamese, it’s very frustrating to read Vietnamese names without the accent marks because then you don’t actually know how to pronounce the words. And it’s a monosyllabic language, so “Viet Nam” has always been two words. It’s smashed together by the English language. That’s what the English language does with all place names like “Sai Gon” or “Ha Noi.” It’s a lot of work to make something incorrect. I wanted to name them the way they’re actually named.

  Related to that, were you ever conscious of your audience or who would read the book?

  Very much. I think that has to do not with marketing but with being an educator. I wanted to make it accessible to a wide audience. I thought a lot about who the readers would be and I tried to give each part of that audience an access point. If you couldn’t relate to the historical stuff, maybe you could relate as a child or as a parent. And I wanted it to be a mirror for experiences that don’t often get represented.

  Before you assembled this oral history, did you and your siblings discuss these things much?

  Yeah. A lot of sibling talk is about your parents and there was a lot of self-therapy. The book is really a form of therapy.

  I ask because your siblings were older so they remember a lot of different things that you didn’t. For example when you went back to Vietnam, they remembered places while you went, “Oh, this is from that photograph.”

  That was part of thinking about how you tell a story that you weren’t really a part of. It was about empathizing as much as possible with the people who were there. Drawing it I had to think about concrete details like what were people wearing, what kind of stool would my mother have sat on, what did the cooking apparatus look like. The kinds of things that ground the story in lived details. I had to do a lot of visual research. I drew the layout of our house in Viet Nam many many times with both my parents to make sure it was right.

  I’m sure that researching some of this wasn’t easy.

  I got into a lot of really depressing rabbit holes just reading about the history. It was hard to find exact reference material. But that work is also pretty fun, though.

  There must have been a lot of depressing rabbit holes.

  Yes. Sometimes I wondered about why I was writing about a war from many years past, but sometimes it takes that long to get the proper perspective. A lot of the past forty years has been the Vietnamese diaspora getting over the hurt of losing that war. My parents’ generation carries a lot of hard line anti-Communist sentiment. You can’t really blame them because there was real hurt there, but it is forty years later. Things have changed; we don’t have to carry those divisions into the future. I think my generation is letting go of some of that baggage.

  In the book you make clear how complex that baggage is because it’s not as simple as being Communist or anti-Communist.

  Yeah, because things really aren’t clear.

  In Vietnam, Diem was this brutal dictator in the South and Ho Chi Minh was doing horrible things in the North. There was no place for moderates or people who wanted change but didn’t support such violence.

  It didn’t make it into the book, but one of the things that my parents learned was what the North Vietnamese thought was happening in the South. The campaign was to liberate the South from American imperialists. When they managed to do that, Northerners came down and my father’s father came down to see him for the first time in twenty years. He was very surprised that we weren’t starving because that was the story they had been told. He actually brought supplies because he thought that we would be starving.

  That theme of independence and striking out on your own made me think of how your parents were resettled in Indiana and then moved to California. They made these amazing leaps and adjustments over the course of their lives.

  People do amazing things when they don’t have any other choice.

  I guess that’s the other theme of the book.

  Under extraordinary circumstances there are only two choices, you sink or you swim. My parents swam, but it wasn’t easy.

  You said in the book very explicitly that one of the things they taught you was to swim, to continue that metaphor, and to be prepared to do that at a moment’s notice. Which has both good and ill qualities, I’m sure.

  I think so. In times of peace it feels a little bit like how I imagine a war veteran might feel. Maybe a little ill-suited to normal life. Because you’re equipped with a mentality and skillset for times of great trouble.

  You also made a great piece for The Nib in January called “Fear is a Great Motivator.” Could you talk about where you were when you made that?

  The Nib came up with that title, I didn’t.

  The things that I was thinking about were what do we do now and how do we get people to wake up and do stuff that they haven’t been doing before — like paying attention to who their representatives are and making phone calls. I was also thinking about race relations in this country. I have a lot of friends who are people of color who have quite a bit of mistrust of white ally-ship. And I have a lot of friends who are white who are great allies. I sometimes feel like a weird bridge, part optimistic and part pessimistic. Mostly I was trying to encourage people.

  You make the point that the “liberal bubble” that some people deride is a place where you don’t have to defend your right to exist. That seems like such a small thing, and yet, here we are.

  Yes. There’s a lot of uncertainty.

  You captured that sense of uncertainty but possibility.

  I suppose my priorities are clear to me. I have a dream of how I would like America to be. It’s one in which I don’t have to defend my right to exist. It’s one where maybe the racists need to prove what economic boon they’re bringing to the rest of us. [Laughs] There’s a lot of work to do. I’m not wasting any time with fairy tales about how inclusive America is because, I mean, clearly it’s not. It’s taking some major steps backwards. I would say to my liberal friends that those nice myths about democracy and inclusiveness have never been very comforting to me. Maybe the one good thing is that it’s clear now. The problems that many of us have been trying to get people to think about and face up to are really undeniable now.

  On your blog you’ve talked about and posted pages from “A Different Pond” which is drawn in a very different style from this book. What is “A Different Pond?”

  It’s a 32-page children’s picture book. It was written by a poet named Bao Phi who lives in Minneapolis. He’s an activist and a community organizer and a slam poetry hero to a lot of Asian-Americans. I was sent the manuscript without his name and I liked the manuscript. I asked who the writer was and when they told me I was like, yeah, I’ll work with him. [Laughs] It was also a chance to slow down with the art. I had to draw and color so fast for my book. It sounds like it was a slow process but the writing of it and pulling the material together into a cohesive narrative took the longest. Drawing and coloring it was this really crazy few months. The artist in me wanted a project that was shorter so I could dive into the art. That’s why the style is so much more detailed and in full color.

  When is the book coming out?

  It’s coming out in August of this year.

  The content of it was great, too, because it’s an immigrant story about a Vietnamese-American family that came here around the same time as mine. It’s about a father and son from the son’s perspective. One of the cool things about getting to illustrate it in great detail was getting to put a lot of the stuff of daily life and everyday surroundings into it. I took a page from Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen,/i> and collected memorabilia. I spent a lot of time obsessing over the posters they would have had on their walls, what kind of shoes the boy would wear. I really wanted to put him in some Adidas but I knew that his family could not afford them so I looked up what in the early ’80s would have been the knockoff shoes. It’s 1982 but they’re wearing bellbottoms because all their clothes are hand me downs from the church.

  That sounds like a nice change, a related but very different project.

  Yesm exactly. Next I’m going to do more short pieces. One of them is going to have to be about education. I have many years in public education and I have a lot of things to say about that. My big next project is about climate change in Viet Nam. It doesn’t have a happy ending, but it is about resilience.

  What is the status of things in Vietnam? I’m sure the people in the Mekong Delta have to deal with rising sea levels and acidification.

  The Mekong Delta is only six feet above sea level. With the amount that the sea is rising every year, the whole area is going to be underwater by 2050. That area grows half of the rice of the entire country. About a million people will have to move out of the area. They’ve already had to adjust their farming techniques quite a bit due to drought over the past few years and now they’re having to adjust even more. But they are. I think studying it, the world will learn a lot about how we’re all going to have to adjust. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s reality now. It’s completely ridiculous when you juxtapose it with climate change denial in the US. There’s no climate change denial in Viet Nam.

  The Best We Could Do is available now from Abrams ComicArts.

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A Different Pond
Sarah Hunter
Booklist.
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
* A Different Pond.
By Bao Phi. Illus. by Thi Bui.
Aug. 2017.32p. Capstone, $15.95 (9781623708030). K-Gr. 3.
Before dawn, a Vietnamese American man and his young son set out to fish for their supper in a nearby lake. As they
travel the lamp-lit streets, build a small fire, and drop their hook into the water, the little boy contemplates his parents'
lives, the everyday task of fishing for their supper, and the stories they've told him about living in Vietnam before
coming to America as refugees. Phi's bittersweet story of the resourcefulness of an immigrant family is lovingly
illustrated in Bui's evocative artwork. Her expressive ink-black brushstrokes stand out against a background of starspeckled,
crepuscular blues, and at poignant moments in Phi's story, she movingly homes in on the facial expressions of
the boy and his father. While the story occasionally hints at painful things, the gravity of those events is depicted in the
emotional reactions of the characters in the present, rather than images of war in the past. The boy's father has fond
memories of Vietnam, heartbreak for the people he lost in the war, and gratitude for the opportunities afforded to him in
the U.S., all of which the boy silently internalizes into both appreciation for his life and curiosity about a place he's
never been. This wistful, beautifully illustrated story will resonate not only with immigrant families but any family that
has faced struggle.--Sarah Hunter
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hunter, Sarah. "A Different Pond." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 66. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA499862854&it=r&asid=af15a11984d2a44e610e47b412dd77de.
Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862854

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Phi, Bao: A DIFFERENT POND
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Phi, Bao A DIFFERENT POND Capstone Young Readers (Children's Fiction) $15.95 8, 1 ISBN: 978-1-62370-803-0
A fishing trip is not just a fishing trip in this poignant, semiautobiographical tale. As a young boy growing up in a
Vietnamese refugee family in Minneapolis, Phi would wake up "hours before the sun comes up" to go fishing with his
dad. Right from the start, he hints at his family's dire straits: "In the kitchen the bare bulb is burning." Readers learn
they are up so early because his dad got a second job. And Phi asks innocently, "If you got another job, why do we still
have to fish for food?" At the pond, father and son share moments of tenderness. A nod here--when Phi lights a fire
with one strike of a match; a warning there--to avoid "the spicy stuff" in his bologna sandwich. Father and son also
bond through stories. "I used to fish by a pond like this one when I was a boy in Vietnam," says Dad. "With your
brother?" Phi asks. Dad nods and looks away, a clue to the unspeakable devastation of the war. When they catch
enough fish for dinner they head home, Phi dreaming about the landscape of Dad's home country. Together, Phi's
gentle, melodic prose and Bui's evocative art, presented in brushy and vividly colored panels and double-page spreads,
rise above the melancholy to tell a powerful, multilayered story about family, memory, and the costs of becoming a
refugee. Spare and simple, a must-read for our times. (Picture book. 5-9)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Phi, Bao: A DIFFERENT POND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495427462&it=r&asid=7a776c860c7fbf37dc8e9c8396e5575a.
Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427462

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Quoted in Sidelights: “are striking in their clarity, expression, and depth,” “with the kind of feeling words alone rarely relay.” “does the very best that comics can do.”
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The Best We Could Do
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.14 (Mar. 15, 2017): p33.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
The Best We Could Do.
By Thi Bui. Illus. by the author.
Mar. 2017. 336p. Abrams ComicArts, $24.95 (9781419718779). 741.5.
Artist and public-school teacher Bui's memoir and graphic-novel debut is a stunning work of reconstructed family and
world history. In 1976, faced with job loss, little food, and constant surveillance, Bui's family fled Vietnam for the U.S.
Her parents were born during the First Indochina War, from 1946-54, and in learning and recording their experiences--
her father's were especially full of unfathomable sorrows--and the complex political situations that led her family to
become refugees, Bui makes sense of what she couldn't as a child. Her stony father's humble heroism emerges, and
though she claims her mother's story is the harder one to tell, since their lives are so entwined, she does this, too, with
fullness and empathy. In an unforgettable scene, young Bui, despite growing up in San Diego, discovers she's inherited
a "refugee reflex" to gather her minimal important belongings and seek safety at the slightest hint of danger. Inked in
black and shaded with red ochre washes, Bui's expressive drawings are striking in their clarity, expression, and depth;
the faces of her loved ones quickly become familiar. In creatively telling a complicated story with the kind of feeling
words alone rarely relay, The Best We Could Do does the very best that comics can do. This is a necessary, ever-timely
story to share far and wide.--Annie Bostrom
YA: This approachable presentation of difficult subject matter presents excellent curriculum support possibilities for
older readers. AB.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "The Best We Could Do." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490998484&it=r&asid=185ec1e32754fc5b72d1c2c71b08f15b.
Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490998484

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A Different Pond
Publishers Weekly.
264.24 (June 12, 2017): p65.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* A Different Pond
Bao Phi, illus. by Thi Bui. Capstone Young Readers, $15.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-62370-803-0
Phi, a poet whose parents were Vietnamese refugees, draws from childhood memories in this story about fishing with
his father before sunrise on the lakes of Minneapolis. They didn't do it for fun; it was a way to put food on the table.
"Everything in America costs a lot of money," his father tells him. Sometimes, they run into fishermen from other
marginalized communities: a Hmong man "speaks English like my dad and likes to talk about funny movies," and a
black man "shows me his colorful lure collection." Though the morning is an adventure for the boy, it's the start of a
long day for his father, who heads to work afterward (as does the boy's mother). Bui (The Best We Could Do) uses
confident ink lines and watery washes of deep blue to evoke the predawn setting and tender familial relationship.
Graphic novel panels and strong figures give the pages the air of a documentary as Phi celebrates an unexpected
superhero: a father who endures a strange new culture, works to support his family, cherishes time with his son, and
draws no attention to the sacrifices he's made. Ages 6-8. (Aug.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"A Different Pond." Publishers Weekly, 12 June 2017, p. 65. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495720751&it=r&asid=58dd0cf73d82dbe0bb5eabad28878945.
Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495720751

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Quoted in Sidelights: “magnificent,”
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The Best We Could Do
Publishers Weekly.
263.50 (Dec. 5, 2016): p58.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* The Best We Could Do
Thi Bui. Abrams Comicarts, $24.95 (336p) ISBN 978-1-4197-1877-9
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Tracing her family's journey to the United States and their sometimes-uneasy adaptation to American life, Bui's
magnificent memoir is not unique in its overall shape, but its details are: a bit of blood sausage in a time of famine, a
chilly apartment, a father's sandals contrasted with his son's professional shoes. The story opens with the birth of Bui's
son in New York City, and then goes back to Vietnam to trace the many births and stillbirths of her parents, and their
eventual boat journey to the U.S. In excavating her family's trauma through these brief, luminous glipipses, Bui
transmutes the base metal of war and struggle into gold. She does not spare her loved ones criticism or linger
needlessly on their flaws. Likewise she refuses to flatten the twists and turns of their histories into neat, linear
narratives. She embraces the whole of it: the misery of the Vietnam War, the alien land of America, and the liminal
space she occupies, as the child with so much on her shoulders. In this melange of comedy and tragedy, family love and
brokenness, she finds beauty. (Mar.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Best We Could Do." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224882&it=r&asid=1cbbdf5900f8682905ce2539390746fe.
Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475224882

Hunter, Sarah. "A Different Pond." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 66. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA499862854&it=r. Accessed 15 Aug. 2017. "Phi, Bao: A DIFFERENT POND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495427462&it=r. Accessed 15 Aug. 2017. Bostrom, Annie. "The Best We Could Do." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490998484&it=r. Accessed 15 Aug. 2017. "A Different Pond." Publishers Weekly, 12 June 2017, p. 65. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495720751&it=r. Accessed 15 Aug. 2017. "The Best We Could Do." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224882&it=r. Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.

• The Comics Journal
  http://www.tcj.com/reviews/the-best-we-could-do/
  Word count: 1084

  Quoted in Sidelights: With the issue of immigration currently hitting full boil stateside, the 2017 publication of The Best We Could Do couldn’t be more timely, or more welcome. Bui’s story movingly puts a human face to new arrivals to our country, illuminating the background of their lives and struggles. … Bui depicts, with unsparing candor, the multiple traumas associated with being forced out of one’s country into the unknown.
  Thematically rich and complex, melding together grief and hope, the personal and the political, the familial and the national, The Best We Could Do is an important, wise, and loving book.
  The Best We Could Do
  Thi Bui
  Abrams
  $25; 336 pages
  BUY IT NOW

  REVIEWED BY ROBERT KIRBY MAR 9, 2017
  The Best We Could Do opens with the complicated, grueling birth of artist Thi Bui’s child in New York City in 2005. 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 responsibility is immense. A wave of empathy for my mother washes over me.”

  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. 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. The weight of this history informs the entire narrative, at times foregrounded but always present.

  In her early twenties, Bui traveled back to Vietnam to meet her extended family. 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. 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. 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. After marrying Bố, Má gives birth to multiple children, usually under extremely difficult conditions, including her daughter, Bích, right before the Tet Offensive in 1968; a stillborn child, Thảo, in Saigon in 1974; and her son Tâm in a UN refugee camp in Malaysia in 1978.

  The sections detailing the history of Vietnam and the war are powerful and painful, offering up a crash course in the history of that long and tragic conflict, from the dark seeds of its origin to its brutal aftermath under an oppressive dictatorship. In one section, Bui describes her parent’s happiness after getting married, living large on two incomes with the future seeming bright—while forces beyond their control are pointing toward large-scale death and destruction. “By this time,” Bui writes ominously, “the chess pieces of the war had been set. It was 1965.” Bui’s narrative voice is admirably straightforward, with an air of a reporter’s detachment, even when describing the most terrible events, infusing her family’s saga with power and grace.

  Bui’s family were among the “boat people” who fled oppressive Communist rule after the war ended. But their troubles didn’t stop after arriving in America; along with the general culture shock, they must contend with bitter social and economic downsizing. Bui’s parents’ educational degrees are not recognized in this strange new land, resulting in long hours of minimum wage work and night schooling to better their economic prospects. Bui vividly describes these blighted early years, stuck at home with her father in an apartment in San Diego, while Má is at work and her sisters are at school. She and her little brother Tâm are left alone to cope with Bố’s off-putting, distant demeanor, and his scary superstitions and paranoia. None of this made the family’s assimilation any easier.

  With the issue of immigration currently hitting full boil stateside, the 2017 publication of The Best We Could Do couldn’t be more timely, or more welcome. Bui’s story movingly puts a human face to new arrivals to our country, illuminating the background of their lives and struggles. Contrary to the rhetoric of the most reactionary U.S. right-wing factions, immigrants are people, not statistics–more than the sum of their homelands, more than the color of their skin. Bui depicts, with unsparing candor, the multiple traumas associated with being forced out of one’s country into the unknown.

  In her introduction, Bui describes the frustration she felt with her original plan of telling her family’s story—a combination of text with some photographs and art: “I didn’t feel like I had solved the storytelling problem of how to present history in a way that is human and relatable and not oversimplified. I thought turning it into a graphic novel might help.” She teams her brushy line with a burnt orange wash that lends an evocative, melancholic feel; even in the present-day scenes there is a sense of the past hovering, seeping into ordinary life. While Bui has self-deprecatingly referred to herself online as “the slowest cartoonist in America,” she is skilled at page layouts, delivering information deftly and imaginatively. As with her text, she accomplishes this without any undue fuss or “look-at-me” graphic pyrotechnics.

  At the narrative’s end, Bui focuses on her now ten-year-old son, wondering if the pain she inherited from being a “product of war” will be transmitted to him: “whether I would pass along some gene for sorrow or unintentionally inflict damage I could never undo.” But she reminds us that life is, at heart, random, and that relationships are not necessarily bound by destiny but by free will and a dizzying array of events, most beyond our control. This final summation is deeply moving. Thematically rich and complex, melding together grief and hope, the personal and the political, the familial and the national, The Best We Could Do is an important, wise, and loving book.

• SF Gate
  http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/The-Best-We-Could-Do-by-Thi-Bui-10989729.php
  Word count: 532

  Quoted in Sidelights: a beautiful and haunting illustrated memoir,”
  “has invested great care into an epic account of her family’s wartime lives in Vietnam and their escape to this country.

  ‘The Best We Could Do,’ by Thi Bui
  By John McMurtrie Published 9:55 am, Thursday, March 9, 2017

  "The Best We Could Do" Photo: Abrams ComicArts
  Photo: Abrams ComicArts
  IMAGE 1 OF 3 "The Best We Could Do"

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  What does it mean to be a refugee? What hardships does a person suffer that force one to flee home for a better life in the United States? And what is it like to assimilate in a country whose citizens often don’t want you here?
  All these questions are raised with great sensitivity in “The Best We Could Do,” a beautiful and haunting illustrated memoir by Thi Bui. This is Bui’s first book — the Berkeley resident teaches in the master’s in comics program at the California College of the Arts — and she has invested great care into an epic account of her family’s wartime lives in Vietnam and their escape to this country in the late 1970s.
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  The graphic novel is also a tender tribute to Bui’s parents’ struggle to raise a family; with age, she comes to a greater understanding of all they have sacrificed to secure better lives for their kids. Raising her own boy, too, gives Bui a deeper appreciation of what her mother, who doesn’t express her feelings easily, has endured.
  Like Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece, “Maus,” Bui’s memoir elicits complex emotions from understated pen-and-ink drawings. A wordless panel of a smiling boy, in Malaysia, offering two juice cartons to refugee children, conveys the pure kindness of humans at their most charitable. Just as striking are ugly images in which an American teenager hurls a racial insult at Bui’s father, then spits in his face. Done in ocher hues, Bui’s illustrations sometimes suggest sepia-toned photos, fitting for a book that revisits past events, many violent and bloody.
  The book, though, is not without lighter moments. When Bui’s father arrives in the United States, driven from Chicago O’Hare Airport to Indiana by a church volunteer, he looks out the window and asks, “Why is it so ugly here?”

  And when Bui’s family decides to leave Indiana for California — “We didn’t bring our kids all the way to America to die of pneumonia!” her father says of the cold — her Indiana relatives protest: “California’s dangerous! They have gangs and pimps and hookers!” Little Thi butts in: “What’s a hooker?” Her mother replies: “Never mind that.”
  Welcome to America, where a sense of humor will always serve one well.
  John McMurtrie is The Chronicle’s book editor. Email: jmcmurtrie@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @McMurtrieSF

• Vulture
  http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/thi-bui-best-we-could-do-refugee-comic.html
  Word count: 1363

  Quoted in Sidelights: possesses a deceptive simplicity that is particular to the comics medium. It’s an artistic tradition that rewards directness of both word and image, and Bui — despite being a schoolteacher with no published comic books prior to this one — dances within that tradition better than most.

  Life As a Refugee Is Explored in the Stunning Comics Memoir The Best We Could Do
  By
  Abraham Riesman
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  Excerpt from The Best We Could Do. Photo: Abrams Books and Thi Bui
  My only complaint about Thi Bui’s debut graphic memoir, which tells the sweeping tale of her family’s lives in Vietnam and the United States, relates to its title. The Best We Could Do is a fine moniker, but the name of this breathtaking work’s sixth chapter would fit the entire book even better: “The Chessboard.” Bui’s story is constructed like one, with the various members of her immediate and extended family beginning in the same place but moving away from it erratically, in fits and starts, eternally out of sync, and occasionally blocking each other’s paths. Nevertheless, they all push toward the same goal. In this case, that goal is understanding, be it on an individual or collective level. How did we end up here, the story seems to ask, on the other side, so hopelessly jumbled?

  As with chess (as well as its Vietnamese counterpart, cờ tướng, which notably appears in the book), this family’s journey is maddeningly slow and constrained by a byzantine set of rules. They’re refugees escaping to America from a region America burned to the ground, and Uncle Sam doesn’t tend to make such a process easy. When Bui began work on The Best We Could Do in 2005, she couldn’t have predicted the significance it would hold when it was released in 2017, but now that it’s here, it feels like one of the first great works of socially relevant comics art of the Trump era.

  ADVERTISING

  By casting light on our present refugee crisis through the tilted mirror of the post-Vietnam one, Bui situates her tome alongside the winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. Both narratives are vital for the way they grant oft-generalized populations not just faces and names, but also political leanings, class backgrounds, personal failings, and all the other things that make a human. Nguyen provides a glowing cover blurb for Bui, declaring The Best We Could Do to be “a book to break your heart and heal it.”

  His endorsement is well-deserved, but that phrase feels too sentimental for what the reader finds inside. Though Bui’s story is much less relentless in its cynicism than The Sympathizer, it’s still as hardheaded as it is heartfelt. The vague outline of the Bui clan’s saga is familiar for any immigrant story: Family starts in one place, has a hard journey to get to another, struggles to settle, and eventually finds some kind of emotional synthesis. However, Bui presents that saga in a way that is narratively intricate, intellectually fastidious, and visually stunning.

  In fact, the second-best title for the book might be the name of the first chapter: “Labor.” In the best possible way, one feels how soaked The Best We Could Do is with sweat and tears. It begins with the birth of the author’s child and ends with her musings on where he’ll go in life, and everything that transpires in between is deliberately fragmentary, nonlinear, and stutter-stepped — paralleling the history of a family perpetually beset by tragedies large and small. The book will no doubt draw comparisons to comics’ most famed immigrant story, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, but where that story marched in mostly straight lines, Bui’s writhes and convulses.

  Excerpt from The Best We Could Do. Photo: Abrams Books and Thi Bui
  That story is only occasionally focused on Bui herself. The other time is spent with her attempting to grasp the individual realities of her family members, especially her mother — she wants to “let her be not what I want her to be, but someone independent, self-determining, and free” (a set of adjectives that echo the macro-level aspirations of Bui’s birthplace in the past century). In doing so, she uncovers significant events stretching from the turn of the last century through Vietnam’s bloody attempts at liberation from France, Japan, and the United States. They are presented more or less in the order she came across them, not the order of how they originally happened — a clever choice, reminding us that all historical memory is as situated in our individual personal chronology as it is in any objective one.

  The tale she tells in that stutter-stepped way benefits from Bui’s astounding eye for detail. She’ll craft a map to convey how the remoteness of the city of Nha Trang allowed her mother to grow up in luxurious privilege, but we feel the lived experience of that privilege when she notes her mother’s childhood anger at the “unfairness” of storybooks always depicting “girls from rich families who were mean and less talented.” We hear of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, the gun-wielder in the infamous “Saigon execution” photograph, but not as a historical cliché; rather, we see the time he declined to kill Bui’s father and merely told an underling, “Give this hippie a haircut.” Those kinds of moments — rendered with evocatively elegant ink-work and rust-red watercolors — have more insight and empathy about the people of Vietnam than all of Apocalypse Now and Platoon.

  The artwork possesses a deceptive simplicity that is particular to the comics medium. It’s an artistic tradition that rewards directness of both word and image, and Bui — despite being a schoolteacher with no published comic books prior to this one — dances within that tradition better than most. Her humans have sparse faces: often just eyebrows, dot eyes, two lines for a nose, and a few mouth strokes. That minimalism packs an emotional wallop, since Bui has given the reader a prime example of what theorist Scott McCloud calls “masking”: faces so basic that they cut past our defenses and make us empathize more than we would with more detail. She draws on a range of visual traditions, too, from the figure drawing of Alison Bechdel to the landscapes of Vietnamese silk scrolls.

  Excerpt from The Best We Could Do. Photo: Abrams Books and Thi Bui
  Yet the most devastating simplicity comes in the form of Bui’s prose. I set out to dog-ear every brilliant piece of compact phrasing; my book is now twice as thick on the top as it is on the bottom. For example, the page on which she uses three sentences to describe the way parenthood’s tension begins just after the first cry of a newborn: “The struggle to bring a life into this world is rewarded by that cry. It is a single-minded effort, uncluttered and clear in its objective. What follows afterward — that is, the rest of the child’s life — is another story.”

  Such a story is the one Bui sets out to tell for not just herself but everyone with whom she shares blood. Her struggle is Sisyphean, as the journey after the birth of a person or a country is hopelessly tangled and contradictory. The only thing that is certain is momentum: As long as there is life, those living will move; even when they die, their specters will move in endless leaps across the neurons of those who remember them. As Bui narrates near the end, “This — not any particular piece of Vietnamese culture — is my inheritance, the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to run when the shit hits the fan. My refugee reflex.” Lucky for us, this refugee stopped running just long enough to tell us of her marathon.

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