美国国家公共电台 NPR Cartoonist Thi Bui Weaves Together Personal And Political History

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Cartoonist Thi Bui's graphic¹ memoir² is called "The Best We Could Do." It tells the story of her family in the years before, during and after the Vietnam War. It was nominated for an Eisner this year, mainstream³ comics' top award. NPR's Mallory Yu recently caught up with Bui at San Diego Comic-Con.

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THI BUI: In the reading I'm going to do for you right now, there are several voices. And I would like to not do them all.

MALLORY YU, BYLINE⁴: Standing⁵ at a podium in front of a few dozen people, Thi Bui begins her spotlight⁶ panel as one of Comic-Con's featured guests. She's the only one on stage. It's an intimate affair until she invites audience members to come up and read passages from her graphic novel.

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BUI: I'm going to try to entertain you a little bit before I make you sad.

YU: And her story is sad. Her parents lost nearly everything during the war and fled Vietnam in the late 1970s when Bui was just a small child.

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YU: Outside the San Diego Convention Center, people in cosplay rush to sign up for panels. There are men ringing bells on ice cream carts. And that's where I met up with Bui. She told me her research began with a grad school project.

BUI: I was in my late 20s. And I was a graduate student at NYU deconstructing all of the bad representations of Vietnamese people in the Vietnam War in movies and pop culture and American scholarship. So it was a very academic grumpiness that I had at the beginning.

YU: She wanted to do more with that research, to make it accessible to a wider audience. And she says graphic memoirs⁷ like Art Spiegelman's "Maus" about the Holocaust⁸ and Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" about the Islamic Revolution inspired her.

BUI: I really wanted to do what they did, you know - weave the personal and the political and historical to, you know, tell a story of the Vietnam War and all the things that caused it in a way that I felt like I hadn't seen before.

YU: So she interviewed the closest sources she had, her parents. Bui says telling them she was writing a book about their lives helped break the ice.

BUI: It's really hard to sit your parents down and say, tell me all your painful history. But if you tell them, I'm working on a book; could you help me with my school project, then, you know - then they - they'll oblige. You figure out your oblique⁹ Asian strategies (laughter).

YU: The book delves¹⁰ as much into her family's history as it does Vietnam's, traumatic things her parents had seen as children and young adults in the years before and during the war. And Bui says she asked basic questions to get the connective tissue of her parents' stories.

BUI: Was it hot? Were you hungry? How did the sand feel on your feet after you lost your slippers¹² in the boat?

YU: These questions helped her parents recall rich details that Bui wove into the graphic novel, details like the executions of political prisoners her father witnessed, how much money her mother got for selling her valuables, the dimensions of the boat her family took to flee Vietnam.

BUI: I'd heard a lot of the stories growing up. And the stories were pretty heavy, and I would often hear them at times when I wasn't ready. So I kind of had this sort of heaviness that I grew up with. And I wanted to make sense of the stories.

YU: She says she struggled with those stories of war and trauma¹¹ and hardship, that they cast a shadow over her life. Then she had a son, and that experience shifted the way she approached "The Best We Could Do."

BUI: I think that maybe if I had done it as not a parent, I might have been happy to just dwell in my trauma. But with a baby in hand, I was really concerned with not passing on that trauma myself. And so I needed to filter stuff out so that I could pass on something cleaner.

YU: And part of that healing came from examining her identity as a child of survivors¹³ and especially as a person who'd fled the place where she'd been born.

BUI: That identity is kind of like being the child of two divorced parents who won't talk to each other. I really yearn¹⁴ for reconciliation¹⁵ between people on both sides of that civil war. It's been my whole life. So understanding that your perspective is not the entire truth I think is an important stepping stone to getting there.

YU: For now, Thi Bui has reconciled her story with her parents'. And she hopes her book can provide a starting point for others to do the same. Mallory Yu, NPR News, San Diego.

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