How Thi Bui’s “The Best We Could Do” Impacted Me as an Audience (Essay Sample)

How Thi Bui’s “The Best We Could Do” Impacted Me as an Audience
Thi Bui is considered as an Asian American writer who is recognized due to her contribution in American literature based on her Asian descent. Mostly, Asian literature is dominated with stories of encounters from the past and ideas as presentation of unexpressed thought. Therefore, “The Best We Could Do” is her memoir that seeks to check her parents’ history of their refugee experiences. The illustrations and narrative in this book contribute to one of the suitable cases of Asian American Literature. In the entire history, the author applies her flashbacks as an approach for expressing her parents’ experiences and story in how they moved to the United States ending up being refugees in this country. The narration in Bui’s “The Best We Could Do” was vital since parenting and understanding the generational-trauma impacted me positively. Later, I learnt how to effectively overcome mental health issues.
First, Bui’s “The Best We Could Do” is presented as a beautifully drawn graphic memoir exploring the story of the author’s parents before they ran Vietnam with her and her siblings. Such approach impacted me positively since it inspired people to meditate on becoming parents and strove to recognize where children, father, and mother are found in the generational story of their family. This influence resulted from the ideas that Bui’s memoir was an outcome of her exploration into understanding her parents better as a mother herself and an adult. This claim is based on her statement, “I am now older than my parents were when they made that incredible journey” (Bui 2017). This impact was reinforced by the perception that at one point the author exhibited two of her siblings being displayed as shadows in a manner that introduced the family, which could automatically make the audience to wonder what occurred to them. Meanwhile, the graphic form bolstered and rewarded Bui’s frequent fairly suitably austere prose.
Secondly, Bui explores the issue of family, which strengthened the positive impact for I had an opportunity of meditating on becoming a parent and understanding the generational story of our family. In this regard, Bui wrote of moving from New York to California with husband Travis to raise her son together to ensure that she was close to her parents. Importantly, the influence this memoir had on me is strengthened when the author after going back to Vietnam for the first time she chose to write the family history to fill the gap that was existing between her parents and her. As a result, she covered her siblings’ birth and the death of Giang Quyen, her parents’ firstborn (Bui 2017). To explain such a premature death, the author revealed that in Vietnam, individuals believe that parents should not give babies beautiful names or else envious spirits are likely to take them away. Towards the end, she explores how parents in the same region recover from such a loss.