The Best We Could Do

The Best We Could Do begins and ends with a depiction of Thi giving birth to her son. This choice taps into a universal understanding of birth as the marker of the start of a new life cycle. Simultaneously, though, this recurring plot element creates a deep, intimate sense of the singularity of Thi and her family’s experience. Bui therefore invokes a shared human experience of the life cycle while telling us that she also understands this shared cycle as something deeply personal, intimate, and unique. For example, while birth as the initiation of a life cycle can be viewed as something of a universal, Thi’s mother’s experience of giving birth to Tam at a refugee camp is not.

By attending to both the macro-level and the micro-level elements of the repeating cycle of life, Bui forwards the notion that, while members of distinct generations within a family share a bond based on a common human experience, they are also bound to each other through legacies of both trauma and joy that unfold over generations. The older generations get to see their progeny struggle with certain universals of the human experience while also grappling with their unique temporal, contextual, political, societal, and even geographical territories that necessitate forward motion and progress.