The Best We Could Do

This chapter opens in Berkeley, California, 2015. Thi tells us that her parents have been separated since she was 19, although they remain amicable and care for one another. When Thi asks her father if he really did go to the movies when she was born, he reacts indignantly, claiming that her mother always casts him in a bad light. When he claims that he drove Thi’s mother to the hospital for every birth except for Bích’s, during which he was living in a different town—and that if he went to the movies, it was only because he was afraid—Thi’s mother insists that he was at the movies when Quyên was born.       

Thi tries to recollect whether her father was all that bad during her childhood. She thinks about the time that her family spent in San Diego, California. She remembers feeling out of place, and the unkind stares and harassment that her family were made to endure. She remembers too the mayor Pete Wilson, “the same California governor [she] would hate many years later for backing one of the most anti-immigrant laws in history” (65). She remembers the “claustrophobic darkness inside [the family] home” (65), which became a “holding pen for the frustrations and the unexorcised demons that had nowhere to go in America’s Finest City” (68).