The Best We Could Do

Thi opens the chapter by stating that she and her father, named Nam, now have a stable relationship: “To stop being scared of him, I grew up and went away” (91). She says, “To understand how my father became the way he was, I had to learn what happened to him as a little boy” (92). Once Thi learned how to ask the right questions, her father’s tongue loosened.

The first of her father’s stories that Thi tells us is that of the pond in Hải Phòng. In 1951, Việt Nam “was still a part of French Indochina” (94). Hải Phòng was the most important seaport North Việt Nam. Nam and his father built a neighborhood near the pond. During the process, they dug a trench which eventually filled with rainwater and became a lake. The people planted foliage and filled the water with shrimp and fish which Nam harvested through fishing. He also taught himself to swim there. However, when a fabric dyer moved to the area and began dumping his dyes into the water, all the animal life in the lake died.

Thi remarks that each of her father’s stories about his childhood have “a different shape but the same ending” (100). Another of his stories, which takes place in a village called Lôi Đồng, is his own origin story. Thi’s great grandfather was a handsome man who arrived at the village Lôi Đồng with his son, Thi’s grandfather. Thi’s great grandfather used his smarts and good looks to land a job as a secretary to the village chief, to whom he was also distantly related. He eventually married the chief’s daughter, who was a wealthy widow. His son, however, was never welcomed into the family, but he eventually married a plain, thin woman who gave birth to Nam.

When Nam was born in 1940, “the Second World War had already begun in Europe, France had just surrendered to Nazi Germany, and Japan, at war with China, sent troops to occupy northern French Indochina and block Chinese supply routes. In the path of war, people built their makeshift lives and survived by whatever means they could” (102). When Nam was 2, his grandfather devised a scheme, which his parents agreed to. Nam’s grandfather, who had already started to cheat on his wife, knew that she had jars of opium stashed around the house. Nam’s grandfather and parents stole one of these jars and then absconded with Nam into “the dense forests and mountains of the North—to Lạng Sơn, where they hoped to start a lumber business” (103).

However, the lumber routes were frequently disrupted by conflicts between Vietnamese insurgents and French and Japanese troops, and the number of French officials requiring bribes to leave their business unmolested was unsustainable. When Nam became very ill, his father was forced to give up the venture and retreat to the city. Because of war shortages and inflation, the Vietnamese farmers were forced to clear their agriculture to produce jute for army supplies. They starved while the French and Japanese troops “hoarded rice and even burned it as fuel for trains when oil was scarce” (105). Nam remembers having to surreptitiously share meager blood sausages that his mother would secretly secure for them.

When Nam was 5, his father “fell in love with the pretty neighbor at the end of the street” (109). Nam’s father soon got into a fight with his wife, during which he hurt her badly and threw her out of the house. This was the last time that Nam saw his mother. It was 1945, during the apex of the famine, and they did not know whether she survived. Nam’s father and grandfather then parted ways. Nam’s father joined the Việt Minh, while Nam’s grandfather took Nam back to Lôi Đồng as a bargaining chip to get his wife to take him back: “In Lôi Đồng, under his grandmother’s protection, Bố escaped starvation. But many others still suffered” (113). Nam’s father returned only once, to inform the family that he would be fighting for the revolution. He was soundly rejected by everyone in the land-owning family, including Nam.

The following August, America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. This led to a power vacuum in Indochina, during which the Việt Minh seized Hà Nội: “On September 2, 1945, Hồ Chí Minh proclaimed [the city] a free republic of Việt Nam” (116). After Japan’s surrender, “the Chinese Nationalist Army, part of the Allied forces in Asia, was sent to Indochina to disarm the Japanese there” (117). Nam’s mother married one of these Chinese soldiers and then traveled with him back to southern China. There, she mothered three more children.

Thi reflects: “1945 could have been the moment for a union of Vietnamese leaders from the North, Center and South to create a self-determining democracy. Had they succeeded, the next thirty years of war might have been avoided [and] millions of lives spared” (118). However, when the French returned to the country, the Việt Minh “withdrew to the rural North, where they could fight a guerilla resistance. Peasants, tenant farmers, and laborers flocked to their cause, because they had long been abused and exploited by landowners and lords who preferred the colonizers to the communists” (119). The French, in turn, made no distinctions between these groups, and terrorized and killed Vietnamese people indiscriminately.

When Nam’s village became a target of the French, the French soldiers massacred the village. The adults managed to hide Nam in the forest, and he listened to the carnage alone, until someone came back for him. On the fourth day of the massacre, members of the Việt Minh rescued the surviving villagers. They brought them through dark waters “to Của Cấm, the estuary that bordered Hải Phòng” (123). However, when the group was detected by French troops, who opened fire, the two Việt Minh abandoned the party, and the villagers were forced to return to Lôi Đồng. Although the villagers submitted to French power, hoping to be left alone, French troops invaded and occupied the area, “[requisitioning food and supplies and [executing] Việt Minh suspects in the courtyard outside [Nam’s] house” (125).

Then, the Việt Minh returned to the village to exact revenge on the village chief. They secured him to a post and then badly brutalized him. The next day, the village chief absconded with his family, and Nam’s family left for the relatively safer city of Hải Phòng, which was now under French occupation. Nam was 7 years old. Thi then brings the story back to herself, reflecting that the fear she felt in the apartment in San Diego was “only the long shadow” of her father’s fear (129). 

This chapter focuses on Thi’s mother, Hắng. Thi recounts that her mother was considered very pretty during her younger days, although those looks were quickly taken from her by the labor of caring for the family. Thi only caught a glimpse of her mother’s former life when a box of old photographs from Việt Nam arrived at the family home during her childhood. She writes, “in those photos, Má looked like someone I wanted to be as a little girl: a princess in a home far more beautiful than mine, in a country more ancient and romantic than the one I knew. It was an affirmation and an escape” (135). This page shows illustrations of the photographs of Hắng during her childhood and young womanhood in Việt Nam.

However, Thi recalls that she returned to these romanticized visions of her mother’s life with “some skepticism” in later life (136). One panel shows her ruminating about “French schools,” “class privilege,” and “1950s morality” as her mother speaks (136). Thi finds that her mother speaks more freely with Travis than she does with her. During one conversation between Hắng and Travis, Hắng states that she was born in 1943. At the time, her family was living in a large house in the capital of Cambodia. Her father was a civil engineer first employed by the French and then by the South Vietnamese government. Before Cambodians began killing Vietnamese people in the country, Hắng’s family enjoyed the benefits of being employed by the French government: “servants, cooks, gardeners, [and] chauffeurs” (137). However, the violence forced the family to relocate back to Nha Trang in Việt Nam.

A map shows the location of Nha Trang “on the central coast [of the country], far from the fighting” (138). Hắng enjoyed an idyllic childhood during which she was well-loved. For a time, she was the youngest in a family of five children, spoiled by her father. She was also allowed to stay in an expensive private French school due to her academic excellence, while her lower-performing siblings transferred to Vietnamese school. When Hắng started catching heat from her siblings for not knowing how to read Vietnamese, she taught herself. She even taught some of the servants how to read and shielded them from her mother’s fearsome wrath. Hắng made friends with a servant girl named Tranh and enjoyed two summer trips to Tranh’s home in the country, where she enjoyed the freedoms and simple pleasures of the countryside.

As she grew up, Hắng began to learn “how the French had come and colonized [her] country. [She] started to feel a sense of nationalism, of pride in my own people” (146). A few panels show a young Hắng asking a classmate not to speak French outside of school—in order to maintain and affirm their Vietnamese identity. The French school in Nha Trang stopped at ninth grade, so Hắng’s parents enrolled her in a faraway all-female Catholic school. There, all the students spoke French all the time. Hắng begged her father to rescue her, and he did. Unbeknownst to her, her father had once suffered a mental breakdown due to a French official that terrorized him. He arranged to have Hắng transferred to the Lycée Yersin, where Hắng found a small group of good friends and flourished. Here, a few panels show a young Hắng saying that she can’t imagine herself being married, and that if she ever does have a daughter, she’ll “tell her to finish school and get a career before ever thinking about boys” (150). Thi returns to the narrative, however, reminding us that Hắng met and married Nam soon thereafter.

Thi tells us that her father’s childhood began to improve when he moved to the Rue de Commerce in Hải Phòng. His grandmother opened a convenience store with a tailoring shop, while his grandfather sold traditional Chinese medicine, and Nam enrolled in school. The Indochina War was still unfolding, and Nam found himself “Westernized” and “citified” (153). He started going to a French school for the rich Vietnamese and the French, Henri Riviere, at age 8. As he grew older and saw widespread poverty and suffering, he began to sympathize with revolutionary, anti-colonial politics—to the displeasure of his grandparents. He tells Thi that his grandparents had lived under French rule their entire lives: There was an entire class and generation of people in Vietnam who favored this way of life. The nationalist communist line viewed taking these peoples’ lives as sacrifices for their cause. Thi tells us about the “human cost of ending France’s colonial rule in Southeast Asia”: “An estimated 94,000 French soldiers died trying to reclaim France’s colony,” while “three to four times as many Vietnamese died fighting them or running away from them” (157).

After the French lost the war, Nam’s French school shut down. The principal wrote him a recommendation for Jean Jacques Rousseau, the French high school in Sài Gòn. Simultaneously, Nam’s estranged father reached out to him through Việt Minh soldiers dispatched to Nam’s grandparents’ home. They told the family that Nam’s father had them tracked down, and that the Việt Minh knew everything about them. The Việt Minh provided safe passage for Nam to come see him, but Nam’s grandfather did not wish to go. Instead, Nam’s grandmother accompanied him on the journey through Hà Nội. There, Nam witnessed the utter scarcity and poverty in which people lived, and the way that everyone, including small children, had to work. Nam and his grandmother eventually arrived in Thái Bình, “deep in Communist territory” (164). He witnessed the villagers being herded into the town square to watch propaganda films under armed guard. Thirty kilometers away laid Nam’s father’s home, where Nam met his father’s new wife and his two young half-siblings.

That night, Nam’s father discussed the developments in the country. The previous summer, “The Việt Minh has signed the Geneva Accords with France […] recognizing Việt Nam’s independence, setting a date two years in the future for a general election, and meanwhile dividing it at the 17th parallel into two parts. A mass exodus of civilians was already leaving the North for the South” (167). Nam let his father believe that he would return to the North permanently. Instead, Nam’s experience of the North convinced him to flee. By this time, the land reforms, modeled after Mao Ze Dong’s land reforms in China by the Workers Party leader Trửờng Chinh, had already begun. These land reforms led to the deaths of 220,000 people. They led to the seizure of Nam’s grandmother’s land and property, while the family escaped execution only because they weren’t there when soldiers arrived.

Nam and his grandfather headed “to register as part of the American evacuation of people to the South” immediately upon Nam’s return from his trip. They were not joined by Nam’s grandmother, who fled the family after her husband cheated on her and then beat her so hard she fell, hit her head, and had to go to the hospital. Nam and his grandfather escaped the North just as the border was sealed in March 1955. They were herded into a military landing craft and taken to Ha Long Bay.

Thi opens this chapter by telling us, “I imagine that the awe and excitement I felt for New York when I moved there after college must be something like what my father felt when he arrived in Sài Gòn in 1955” (173). The page’s illustration shows a young Thi and a young Nam mirroring each other as they take their respective cities in.

Nam and his grandfather enjoyed their lives as bachelors with money to spend as they made their way through Sài Gòn. Nam’s grandmother also made it to the city, although she initially refused to return to her husband. She began sharing an apartment with two other women. The new prime minister of the South, Ngô Đình Diệm, had not yet stabilized his government, and the mafia of the South, called the Bình Xuyên, “controlled the casinos, the brothels, and the drug trade” (176). The government fought the mafia in the streets, and during one of these melees, Nam’s grandmother’s opium jars were smashed. With her income source gone, she was forced to return to her unfaithful, estranged husband: “They pooled their money together and bought a little house for the equivalent of $5,000” (178). It was a meager home but Thi’s first home.

Thi recounts the time that the family returned to this home when the children were grown. Her father refused to go. Thi remarks that she is “lacking memories of [her] own,” so she does research (182). After sifting through archival video news coverage of the Vietnam war during her research for this book, she remarks: “We weren’t any of the pieces on the chessboard. We were more like ants, scrambling out of the way of giants, getting just far enough from danger to resume the business of living” (185). Nam sought escape from the meagerness of his existence by taking advantage of a scholarship to one of the richest schools in Sài Gòn, styling himself like a movie star, and consuming the popular French literature and pop music of the era. He eventually enrolled in Teachers College to dodge the draft. There, he met Hắng.

The panels switch back to depicting Hắng talking to Travis in a car while Thi sits in the backseat. Hắng tells Travis that her time in school at the Lycée Yersin was the best time of her life. In a panel that has an illustration of the self-immolation of the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, who set himself ablaze on a Sài Gòn street in 1963, Hắng says that college was not as good a time for her: “There was a lot of political turmoil, and reasons for my parents to worry for me” (191). Also, after she met Nam, he took up all her time. Thi confesses that she feels hurt by her mother’s confession that she was at her happiest before Thi and her siblings existed. She tells us that, when her mother was young, she originally wanted to be a doctor. However, she was forced to give up on that aspiration. She also found Việt Nam’s society “too confining [and] too limiting” (192). She longed to leave it.

Thi remarks that her parents had a shotgun wedding. Hắng’s family opposed the match, and Hắng admitted to thinking that Nam wouldn’t even live that long: At the end of her first year in college, he became so sick that Hắng thought she could nurse him through a mortal convalescence and then live free after he died. However, he lived. In 1965, after Hắng and Nam lost their first baby, they moved to the city Hà Tiên to fill two open teaching posts and forget their sorrows. There, they enjoyed having “no elders to oversee them, no children to care for, two incomes, and a beautiful town where they were soon welcomed and loved” (199). However, the Vietnam War was brewing as American troops poured into the country, carpet-bombing “a country dependent on agriculture with napalm and the defoliant Agent Orange” (200). Corrupt profiteers bought goods at the American military post exchange and made large profits reselling the goods. Inflation rose while teacher’s salaries did not rise with it. The state began viewing cities as full of enemy combatants. 

Hắng and Nam were visiting their parents in Sài Gòn when the Tét Offensive broke out. Nam remembers being spared by the same general in the famous “Saigon execution” photograph that night. The photo, in which the general executes a Việt Cộng prisoner, turned many Americans against the war. Nam, however, laments that the photograph’s infamy “made South Việt Nam look bad [...] no one talks about how that same Việt Cộng, just hours before, had murdered an entire family in their home!” (206). Thi cannot make out whether her father is defending or deriding the general. She says that the paradoxical nature of her father’s stories bothered her, “but so did the oversimplifications and stereotypes in American versions of the Vietnam War” (207). She reflects that, while the famous photograph essentially ended the war’s presence in the consciousness of Americans, for people like Thi’s family, the war stretched on. She herself was born “three months before South Việt Nam lost the war” (210).

Thi opens this chapter by telling us that, even though most Americans have a single static image of the fall of Sài Gòn—the famous photograph that depicts a horde of Vietnamese refugees being rescued by American military personnel in helicopters—there is actually “no single story of that day, April 30, 1975” (211). She then proceeds to tell her parents’ story of that time period. When Nam lost his job, the regime wanted to place him in a New Economic Zone, “where they pushed those they didn’t trust to do hard labor in rural isolation” (222). The currency changed at the same time, leaving the family scrambling to survive.

In 1976, Nam’s father arrived unexpectedly. He told him about his mother’s new life in China, which he had kept hidden from Nam. He tells Nam, however, that he could no longer associate with the family, as Hắng’s family is too ngụy: “false, lying, deceitful,” or the word that the communist forces used to describe anyone from the South (221). Surveillance, harassment, and spying reached a fever pitch as Hắng and Nam tried to arrange for their family’s escape from the country. Hắng’s brother Hải was taken by the government and the family could not locate him. Nam’s grandmother became very ill, and Hắng would have been forced to abort her latest pregnancy if it weren’t for the kindness of a doctor who could see that she did not want to.

After several attempts to escape fell through, Kiểu, Hải’s wife, came to Thi’s family with a plan. She had finally located Hải, and her parents had found a boat that could be used to escape the country. Thi’s mother knew someone with enough money to buy the boat: “The in-laws would sell places on the boat and repay the investor. For her role as an in-between, Má would receive space for all of us on the boat” (227). Hắng arranged for her parents to care for Nam’s ailing mother, while supplies were smuggled onto the boat and spaces within it were bought. By the time Hải was released from prison, the boat was ready to leave, and Hắng was 8 months pregnant.

Thi’s family left in the middle of the night, assuring Nam’s mother that they would come back, and that Hắng’s parents were there to care for her. The family took a bus from Sài Gòn to Cần Thơ, where their contact arrived very late. However, the family made it to the boat at the last minute. Below decks, Hắng showed her children the passengers whom the family knew, including Hải and his wife.

At this point, the panels switch to relaying the chronology that led to Nam replacing the boat’s inept captain. Nam refused to let the others inject his children with Valium to keep them quiet and even navigated the boat away from suspected Thai pirates, who would surely have killed and robbed the boat’s passengers. On the second night, Thi’s family was allowed above-deck. Hắng told Lan to look up into the sky at the constellation Orion’s belt in order to ease her seasickness. On the third day, the boat entered a Malaysian shore and was guided to land by fishermen, who took the gold they were offered to assist the refugees. The family was taken in by the Pulau Besar refugee camp, while Hắng was taken to a hospital to give birth.