Traveling in the genre of graphic memoirs such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, GB Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010) and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017) diversely sketch out family and national narratives, the narrator/artists laying out their own travel paths, bringing readers to understand not only immigrants’ lives (as opposed to “immigrant life,” which is by no means universal) in the United States, as well as conveying the complex and compelling nature of the Vietnam that they left, and which still exerts a hold on them. Central to both novels is the process of anamnesis: of recovering and reconstituting memory—in a sense, doing what Thi Bui calls a “rewind, reverse” (23) of an immigrant process of forgetting, in the wake of leaving a nation racked by colonialism and war, to a nation whose welcome would be tepid at best. Along with others in the Vietnamese diaspora, they have little chance of returning soon, let alone often, and hence, in those pre-Internet decades, almost no communication with those left behind: realistically, for years, they have no way to keep memories alive, apart from talking with one another, a dicey prospect when the past is laden with trauma.

At the time of this writing, Tran’s novel has attracted attention from several literary critics (including Rocío G. Davis, Mary A. Goodwin, and Alaina Kaus), who focus on memory and reconstitution and their graphical representation, among other concerns. Bui’s more recent memoir has attracted only book reviews and interviews thus far—possibly due to its recent publication, but also because some reviewers classify it as young adult (YA) fiction, one in Booklist characterizing it as an “approachable presentation of difficult subject matter [that] presents excellent curriculum support for older readers” (Bostrom). Moreover, Bui’s publisher notes on the inner jacket, “Teacher’s guide, discussion questions, and pronunciation key [are] available at abramsbooks.com/TheBestWeCouldDo,”: it is marketed as YA, which makes some critics reluctant to engage with it, a deficiency that merits correction in the short and long runs.

My intent here is to analyze both novels—to add to the critical discussion of Tran’s work and to initiate critical discussion of Bui’s—by comparing their redrawings of memory and considering their narrators’ processes of anamnesis embodied in their narrative lines and graphic representations.

The graphic-novel genre is ideal for memoirs of all varieties, particularly for immigration narratives. As Alaina Kaus observes in “A View from the Vietnamese Diaspora: Memories of Warfare and Refuge in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica”:

Kaus builds on Chute’s female-focused discussion to include a graphic memoir written by a man; cross-discursivity (the presence and interactions of both word and image on a page) is simply the way that a graphic novel, any graphic novel, speaks to its reader. Kaus’s observations also apply to The Best We Could Do: the graphic-novel genre, the marriage of word and image, likewise provides the most compelling medium for Bui’s story. Having read both novels—or any graphic novel, but especially a memoir that in Chute’s words revisits, retraces, and repictures—it is worthwhile trying to imagine how such works would communicate as merely words on a page. This is not to say that a “traditional” memoir cannot be transformative or moving: to the extent that a writer brings in concrete images that appeal to the senses in a style that speaks to the reader, a memoir will transform and move, but in a graphic format, what may take a traditional narrative paragraphs or pages to build often appears in a single panel or a short series of panels, as happens in both Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do.

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A note about naming: throughout this essay, I separate the names of the author as author/artist and the author as character: I refer to GB Tran as “Tran” when discussing him as author/artist and as GB when discussing him as a character; similarly, Thi Bui is “Bui” as author/artist and “Thi” as a character. I refer to the other characters by the names that Tran and Thi most commonly use.

About pagination: while Bui’s pagination is consistent and trackable, with clearly defined chapter breaks, Tran’s novel rarely features page numbers and does not offer traditional chapter breaks: if he does number a page, it is at a pause or shift in his narrative (not as a titled chapter) by means of a monochromatic full-page panel (generally called a splash panel) in black, brown, red, cyan, or white, followed by an isolated small panel against a monochromatic background, that page also numbered. Citing is thus problematic, but in an oddly compelling way: readers and critics must focus especially sharply on the visual, as well as on any accompanying narrative, when discussing his work. With Bui’s novel, however, one may use the customary parenthetical citation. Also, throughout the essay, I typically use dashes or ellipsis dots to indicate panel transitions.

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Both novels begin with a major generational event marking a transition. GB accompanies his parents (Tri and Dzung, whom he calls Dad and Mom) to Vietnam for the funerals of his paternal grandfather (Huu Nghiep) and maternal grandmother (Thi Mot), his last surviving grandparents; Thi gives birth to her son, attended by her husband Travis, with her mother (whom she consistently calls Má, as she calls her father Bố) out in the hall, overcome by emotion. Each narrator has essentially moved up a generation (GB by an ending and Thi by a beginning), and in each case, each narrator’s mother opens a flood of recollection, later augmented by the more reticent father, and to a lesser extent (in Tran) by other family members and friends along the way. Parental narratives, particularly maternal, predominate by far, but those of the father (who in both texts initially resists any notion of a talking cure) often catch more attention: the fathers, each of whom is estranged from his own father, have both lived through great trauma, for which they typically compensate by shortness of words (and in Tri’s case by the recurring chk chk of a lighter, used by him or by other men, to light cigarettes or funereal incense).

The backgrounds of Tran and Bui are similar on the surface, with a few significant differences: they both come from two-parent families, and each has three siblings: GB’s are Lisa, Manny, and Vy (all of whom are born in Vietnam, while GB is born in the US); Thi’s are Lan, Bích (“It’s pronounced BICK, okay?” [Bui 29]), and her younger brother Tâm. Thi is the third (living) child; two additional siblings (Quyên and Tha’o), interestingly represented as shadows of adolescents, as if they had kept growing (29), have died in infancy, and her younger brother is born in a Malaysian refugee camp after the family leaves Vietnam. While Bui’s family tree appears relatively uncluttered, some of Tran’s relatives have multiple marriages or liaisons: GB’s paternal grandmother, Le Nhi, abandoned by her husband, during the first Indochina War (between the Viet Minh and the French), enters a common-law marriage with “Le Colonel,” by whom she has a son before he is killed in a marketplace bombing. Huu Nghiep also marries again. Tri himself later marries a Frenchwoman. In Tran’s drawing of his family tree, her flowing blonde hair partially obscures her name, which begins with “He,” with the third letter possibly an “n” or an “r.” She gives birth to Lisa and Manny before leaving alone to return to France, and her very existence is kept as a family quasi-secret, GB not learning of her until adulthood. In Tran’s family history, children often shift between relatives’ homes, avoiding local flare-ups of war with the Japanese, the French, or the Americans, and at times, various adults take in orphans to help with the considerable daily workload of survival.

Legalistic boundaries of “family” are effaced in Tran’s novel, much more so than in Bui’s. Even so, in Bui’s novel, family status does not guarantee intimacy. While Má speaks glowingly of her own father, she confesses about her mother, of whom she rarely speaks: “I hated it when my mother hit the servants. But she hit her children, too. We were ALL terrified of her” (Bui 142). She continues, across a few panels: “She always wore immaculate white clothes, and smoked exotic tobaccos. Sometimes I’d try to climb onto her lap and breathe in her smell . . . but she always pushed me away” (142). Even after her mother and father come to the United States when Thi is about twelve years old, their relationship remains distant (34). Not surprisingly, as a girl, Má initially does not plan to marry, telling her friends (albeit to Thi’s shock when she relates it to her), “I can’t picture it. I just want to study all my life. Become a doctor, if I can, and help people” (150). Thi recalls, “But I know what happened next. She married my father” (151). Their union is problematic, in many ways a casualty of the immigration process. Bố, like Má, had been a teacher in Vietnam, but in the US, like Má, he is now only offered menial jobs, so he stays at home with Thi and Tâm, leaving Má to carry the family’s financial burdens, and more significantly, he isolates himself with his own demons, as yet not understood by his children. Even though at the time of her writing Bui’s parents have separated, the family lives in relatively close proximity to one another—although, as Bui comments and upon which she elaborates, “proximity and closeness are not the same” (31).

Tran’s family, by contrast, lives scattered around the US: Tran sketches a map showing New York (where he and Lisa live), California (where Vy lives), and Florida (where Manny lives) colored in yellow, labeled as the Federation of Free States; Arizona, colored red, is the Parent’s Republic of Vietnam; the rest of the continental US, colored brown, separating siblings and parents, is the Great Cultural Divide, surrounded by the white Sea of Cultural Loss (over which the family has flown to establish themselves in the US). As Kaus notes, “Clearly evoking the Vietnamese flag, the red and yellow chart Vietnam over the United States” (1). On the facing page, Tran observes, captioning a half-page panel of a plane crossing a dark blue, watercolor-clouded sky, “Mom and Dad fled Vietnam to keep the family together,” adding, captioning a drawing of the whole (young) immigrant family (with only himself and Vy smiling), “If they hadn’t, Dad would have ended up in a labor camp, Mom denied work and forced to struggle in poverty, and my sisters and brother reduced to street beggars. Who knows if I would have ever been born?”

Tran’s and Bui’s families’ respective departures from Vietnam also account for some differences in the novels’ outlooks and approaches: Tran’s father, mother, and siblings are able, with the help of an American friend, to fly out of the country on April 25, 1975, five days before the iconic April 30, 1975 (known in many US history books and to South Vietnamese emigrés as the “Fall of Saigon”). The plane stops in the Philippines, in Guam, in San Diego, and ultimately in South Carolina, their eventual home: the trip takes a matter of days. Bui’s family, by contrast, is unable to leave until 1978, when Thi is three years old and when Má is eight months pregnant with Tâm, and so they experience the worst of post-1975, pre-normalization Vietnam: because the parents have not clearly supported unification/liberation, they live a relatively precarious existence until they can arrange to escape with others by boat. As Bui narrates, they travel, avoiding government patrols and pirates, “one hundred kilometers east to international waters,” then “seven hundred kilometers southwest to Terengganu, Malaysia” (240), thereafter waiting for months in a refugee camp for some nation in which they think they can survive to let them in. Fluency in French and competence in English help, but the Buis’ journey is much more fraught than that of the Trans.

Despite their only slight difference in age (Thi is a toddler and GB yet unborn), they are of separate immigration generations: Thi of the first, and Tran of the second. Thi has a few active memories of Vietnam, as well as of her family’s emigration, whereas GB has to rely upon accounts relayed by his parents and siblings, before eventually traveling to Vietnam as an adult. Because Thi has consciousness, memory, and speech when she arrives in the US, her acculturation process differs from that of GB, and so does her account thereof. Significantly, she chronicles her childhood, mostly in linear fashion, connecting her story with the recollections of her mother and father, while second-generation GB concentrates on his trip to Vietnam at age thirty, with his parents’ stories forming extensive flashbacks, his own childhood a mostly irrelevant era.

Further, possibly because of greater proficiency in Vietnamese, Bui writes all Vietnamese names, places, and words with diacritical marks, whereas Tran does not. The diacritical marks reflect the tonal quality of Vietnamese. A name like Má, for example, carries a rising tone, one of the five tones used in the South, or the six used in the North, to distinguish it from other ma words of different tone. Bui focuses closely on language elsewhere in the novel, noting subtleties of words:

In an inset panel on the same page, as she towels off her son after his bath, she invites him, “Call me Mama,” and he retorts, “No! You are Mommy.” She reflects:

She pays close attention to that small but powerful word, rendered in the prestigious Northern dialect or the everyday Southern, extending to an Eastern/Western linguistic divide, and this focus also fans out to her usage of diacriticals, with their underlying tones.

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To return: Tran’s novel opens with death, Bui’s with birth. These events release floods of memories, in both novels crossing from the frame narration to that of the mother, continuing with the father, and then moving on divergent paths. Anamnesis operates in each of the storytelling parents: the act of relating the past brings it progressively more to life to the narrator, especially in the case of the fathers, who each overcome initial reticence. Each novel’s frame story also relates the anamnesis of the author. Both begin with the author’s character in a moment of transition, with the father, mother, and others layering in narratives (in Tran, over several weeks in Vietnam in 2005; in Bui over a few years after the birth of her son). Throughout, the memoirs bring both into deeper understandings of who they are and where they have come from, reconstituting memory, bringing a fuller presence of Vietnam into their American or Americanized lives. What evolves is memory at one remove—mostly parental, although Bui can build on some actual childhood memories—but as the parents have experienced life in Vietnam a generation earlier, their children, now the parents’ “Vietnamese” age, can begin to identify with them as adults in a way that would have been impossible for them to do as children.

Tran’s frame story actually begins with the words of his mother as GB sits silently next to her on a plane: because GB would write this memoir with his name on the cover and spine, the reader may initially assume it is his narration, but as the mother continues to speak, the reader quickly discovers, seeing the words “your father,” whose voice it is. Against panel backgrounds of the red, black, and pale yellow of the sky and the Saigon landscape of 1975, Dzung begins:

A wide central panel, wordless, depicts a destroyed airport, and then below, GB’s father and mother, thirty years younger, sit pensively, as the mother voices over, “That was 30 years ago.” Time jumps forward to another interior aircraft scene. As Mary Goodwin notes in “Mapping Memory in Tran’s Vietnamerica,” “the earlier trip is set in black against a red sky; on GB’s later trip, however, the sky is empty and white.” Tran’s color scheme shifts to white, pale yellow, rust, and sky blue, and Dzung continues, while Tri sleeps, isolated by Bose headphones, “Your father was the same age as you are now. . . . Funny coincidence, don’t you think?” As the narration proceeds, generations collapse into each other, especially those of fathers and sons: Tri uncannily resembles his father, Huu Nghiep, at his age—most uncomfortably, GB observes on a visit with his father to Huu Nghiep’s house (“the coldest house in all of Saigon”) as his grandfather’s widow, who is never named, points out (“It’s like my husband’s sitting here in front of me”). She later grasps his arm too affectionately for his comfort level and notes, “Just as tall as your father,” cuing Tri to lead an exit. Later, less disconcertingly, Tri’s old friend Do, who does not make the 1975 exit and who spends six years in a re-education camp, observes the family likeness: “Same posture, same hair, same nose! . . . Act the same, too: whenever I visited Huu Nghiep after you escaped to America, he barely said a word. . . . It was just like NOT talking to you!” But resemblances are not always surface level: during this time, GB has already discovered that his grandfather, who had been a doctor, had also been a writer (ironically, given his neglect of his own son, of a book on the care of children); and on a subsequent visit to the cold house, he sees one of his father’s paintings (discovering not only that his father had abandoned his painting career when leaving Vietnam, but that his seemingly cold and doctrinaire grandfather, who would have regarded his son’s artwork as bourgeois, had nonetheless placed the one surviving painting—the rest had been burned in 1975—in a place of honor). While the DNA has not come out strongly in GB’s appearance, it appears to have influenced his occupations as writer and artist.

Tran’s graphic techniques subtly separate scenes and narratives, which is important because throughout the novel, flashbacks and flashforwards abound. He employs a variety of color palettes and techniques. The book’s high-gloss paper sets off the saturated reds, blacks, and blues of battle scenes. The deep greens, blues, and browns of the countryside; the bright, cartoonish colors of some of Tri Huu’s flashbacks; some stark black-and-white narratives; along with the primary red, yellow, and cyan of post-Liberation socialist-realism style splash panels; as well as the solid (or nearly solid) colored numbered pages, catch the eye, as well as replicating GB’s iterative process of learning about his parents’ and older relatives’ pasts in Vietnam. The eye seeks a resting place now and then, but Tran’s artwork keeps it moving. He uses a variety of panel shapes and sizes: some bordered, some open, some deckle-edged. Most are rectangular, but in a few instances, waving lines of smoke (generated by a burning incense stick or a flicked lighter) enclose rounded, irregular panels. His approach reaches into visual multi-media: a collage of photographs of the youthful Dzung, Tri (reminiscent of the photos that Vladek, in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, drops on the table and the floor when he tells his son who in his family has survived and who has not [274-76]) and others forms a splash panel opposite the solid black page 137. Also facing a solid black page (Tran 159) is a map of Southeast Asia, with Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia stencil-labeled, like US military supply containers, with South Vietnam a deep trench, full of desperate men, women, and children reaching for retreating aircraft carriers and other boats. North Vietnam’s trench is depicted as empty, and beyond the curved earth, the black sky over China is lit up with red rays. Tran’s variety of illustration provides division, and hence momentum, to this otherwise undivided book. Tran also is careful to distinguish between narratives: he voices his mother in handwriting, his father in caps, and others in printed upper and lower case. As they speak, or are spoken of, characters age and “youth,” often from panel to panel when memory rolls back the years or pushes them forward. Tran also ensures that a reader can recognize the aged, mature, youthful, or childlike depictions of any given character: characteristic features of hairline or hair ornament, eyes, and mouth stay uniform over the years, while faces and hair length and color will change with time.

In contrast, Bui’s color palette throughout her novel is uniform: similarly to the color scheme of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (a monochromatic grey-blue with black line), Bui makes a monochromatic wash of sienna (possibly evoking the orange house, her childhood San Diego home, or perhaps suggesting earth, red clay) with clean black lining and shading. A complementary sky blue frames the front and back cover linings and also features on the cover, which has the texture of good matte drawing stock (in comparison with Tran’s glossy cover, done in the primary colors of the Vietnam and US flags). Her technique, especially when compared to that of Tran, seems simple: she does not shift color groupings, and her lettering is of a uniform font throughout, with the exception of sound effects. But the novel’s chapter titles—labor; rewind, reverse; home, the holding pen; blood and rice; either, or; the chessboard; heroes and losers; the shore; fire and ash; and ebb and flow—organize her and her parents’ narratives, without the need for differentiated color schemes. Moreover, Bui’s novel, despite its depictions of stress, danger, and trauma, overall carries what the romantic poet William Wordsworth, in the preface to his 1800 collection Lyrical Ballads, could call “emotion recollected in tranquillity”: despite the content of the memoir, her writing, more than Tran’s, seems to arise from a sort of resolution, even serenity. She has had more time to process the stories, which emerged over a longer time period: GB’s over a period of months, Thi’s over a period of approximately ten years. The end of Tran’s novel closes a narrative circle: time has rolled forward to the moment when his parents invite him to go with them on the trip with which he begins the novel—his delayed “yes” (provoked when he glances at his father’s inscribed message in a book: “To my son, Gia-Bao Tran. ‘A MAN WITHOUT HISTORY IS A TREE WITHOUT ROOTS’—Confucius”) inspiring openness to change and the confrontation with history that has transpired throughout the memoir. Bui’s novel ends on a note of hope, with Thi’s ten-year-old son swimming blissfully underwater. GB is an adult, with transitions ahead of him; Thi, possessed of her parents’ stories, has launched her own child into the future. Both novels provide tension in the form of traumatic memories, but Tran compresses his while Bui lets hers roll out over time. So the overall mood of the two novels is strikingly different: both navigate through trauma, but Tran remains edgy (frequently showing GB reacting with emotional explosions of shock or disbelief), while Bui seems to take each emotional wave in stride, perhaps because of her comparatively calmer colors and lines, but possibly because of their varying life experiences and personalities.

Under the apparent differences, Tran and Bui’s techniques share some similarities. Bui’s panels are mostly rectangular, some with closed borders and others open. Similarly to Tran, Bui provides photos (from the refugee camp), but rather than showing an overlapping collage, she tiles four photos (of Lan, of her father, of Bích, and of her mother holding her) evenly, captioned “We were now BOAT PEOPLE.” She surrounds this family still life by sketches of other photographs, captioned “—five among hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding into neighboring countries, seeking asylum” (Bui 267).

Similarly to Tran, Bui youths her parents as they re-enter their past worlds, and she frequently juxtaposes herself and a parent at comparable ages. Her chapter 6 splash panel shows her and her young father facing away from each other, seemingly standing on the same curb, but separated by decades and an ocean. She regards the Brooklyn Bridge while he takes in a Saigon street scene, as she comments (on her side of the panel), “I imagine that the awe and excitement I felt for New York when I moved there after college” (and on his) “—must be something like what my father felt when he arrived in Sài Gòn in 1955” (Bui 173). More dramatically, Bui occasionally draws several panels, with her and her father aging and youthing as the narrative requires: Thi, as a child, observes her father (approximately forty years old, wearing a white tee-shirt and white pants, sitting at a dinette table, smoking). She reflects, “To understand how my father became the way he was”—shifting to the same child Thi, now watching her child-father (now her contemporary), wearing a black pyjama outfit, sitting at the same dinette, and still smoking—“I had to learn what happened to him as a little boy.” In the next panel, a reverse-shot perspective shows both children seated at the dinette: “It took a long time”—shifting to the present, with her father, now old, and she, now mature, seated at the table (her father wearing a white tee-shirt and black pants), concluding “to learn the right questions to ask” (92).

Thi’s approach to memory recovery is to actively interview her parents (whereas GB’s mother initiates the cascade of recollections). Gazing at her newborn son, she reflects, “FAMILY is now something I have created—and not something I was born into—the responsibility is immense—A wave of empathy for my mother washes over me” (Bui 21-22). Having learned from her mother, “You forget how painful [childbirth] was.—I had forgotten until I saw you on that bed, and it all came back to me” (20), she seemingly feels compelled to reach out. Her mother has flown to New York to be with her when she gave birth, only to miss the moment, overcome in her own recollected pain. But their conversations in the hospital eventually culminate in Thi’s moving her family to California to be near the rest, to reconnect. Once she learns the “right questions,” her distant father, whom she initially sees as vaguely threatening, quietly menacing as he smokes his frustrations away at the kitchen table, unlocks himself, and “the stories poured forth with no beginning or end—anecdotes without shape, wounds beneath words” (93) and he launches himself back to 1951, to the countryside near Hai Phong. As Bui later comments, “Each of Bố’s stories about childhood has a different shape but the same ending” (100): loss, accompanied by violence observed, more often suffered. His father beats him and his mother, and in 1945, his father throws his wife out. Her son never sees her again and only later hears that she has gone to China with a Nationalist soldier returning home from the war—she drops out of the narrative, over the border, later bearing three more children (117). Bố’s father joins the Viet Minh, while his grandfather remains a landlord and raises the boy (with the father occasionally returning home to take out his frustrations on his son). Bui continues, “Away to the relative safety of Ha’i Phòng, a city now controlled by the French, went Bố at the age of seven,” and jumping forward decades, “And in the dark apartment in San Diego, I grew up with the terrified boy who became my father” (128). She concludes, in her child persona, “Afraid of my father, craving safety and comfort, I had no idea that the terror I felt was only the long shadow of his own” (129). Looking over her artwork, her father comments to his adult daughter, “Mm. You know how it was for me. And why later I wouldn’t be . . . normal” (130). In a September 2017 interview with Irene Noguchi, Bui explains:

But as her father’s stories unspool, the part of him that resisted fear, or temporarily repressed it, comes out when he relates how he was able to navigate the boat on which they escaped and save the lives of all on board. “In the end,” writes Noguchi, “she paints her parents as deeply human: flawed yet persistently hopeful in their own ways.” As Bui explains about the title of her memoir, “Sometimes the best we can do isn’t good enough, and sometimes the best we can do is very heroic and amazing. And both those things can come from the same people” (qtd. in Noguchi).

Bui expresses more difficulty in writing about her mother, “maybe because my image of her is too tied up with my opinion of myself” (131), so she begins with her own memories of her mother, whose child self she idolized, “a princess in a home far more beautiful than mine, in a country more ancient and romantic than the one I knew” (135). Despite Má’s alienation from her own mother, she still lives a privileged life, attending French schools and, unlike Bố, relatively cocooned from the conflict between the French and the Viet Minh. As the parental narratives unspool, Bui follows them forward through the years, gradually relating a national narrative of Vietnam, along with the maturing narratives of Má and Bố.

Both texts carry the twentieth-century history of Vietnam, as well as of Vietnamese families, and the political and the personal inextricably build the narratives. As Kaus writes of Tran, he

Similarly, Bui writes from the Vietnamese diaspora, also narrating history, albeit concentrating more on the Second Indochina War. The two wars, however, both involved a liberation struggle within Vietnam (the first against France, the second against the US). Bui, like Tran, situates part of her family as complicit with the colonizers (sending the children to French schools), and she, like Tran, also shows family members questioning colonization and turning away from it, as young Má does in high school: feeling “a sense of nationalism, of pride in my own people,” when despite her French fluency, she consciously chooses to speak Vietnamese and to turn away from elitism (Bui 147). But much of her history lesson focuses on the American war: in 1965, her mother relates, “American planes carpet-bombed a country dependent on agriculture with napalm and the defoliant Agent Orange” (200) and that “money ruined everything else [. . .] amidst skyrocketing inflation . . . teachers’ salaries stayed fixed” (201). Reflecting on her parents’ stories, Bui writes,

Bui portrays April 30, 1975, her panels set up in a rare diagonal arrangement: “In Việt Nam today, among the victors, it is called LIBERATION DAY. Overseas, among expats like my parents, it is remembered as THE DAY WE LOST OUR COUNTRY” (211): taking up nearly half the composition below is the iconic (to Americans, at least) scene of a helicopter atop a building, with hordes of persons, warded off by a man on the roof, captioned “This is the image that most people know of the fall of Sài Gòn” (211). In the following pages, radio bulletins, accompanied with stark images chronicling the listeners’ fears, resolve in the unexpected (to Bui’s parents, as well as to many American readers), as Bui explains,

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At this historical point, the Buis would have three more years in Vietnam, while the Trans have just left. While Tran’s father does not have the literal last word, his thoughts, just before Dzung relates the story of their escape thirty years on, set that final narrative into perspective: Tri explains to GB, “You can’t look at our family in a vacuum and apply your myopic contemporary Western filter to them.” The caption for a panel of people warming their hands over a fire of Tri’s paintings reads: “Our family wasn’t alone. We weren’t a special case. Everyone suffered. Everyone had to do whatever they needed to survive.” Over a panel of Do embracing his wife are the words: “Years passed before families reunited.” Tri continues, through scenes of rebuilding, of Thi Mot and her son putting away photos, of Huu Nghiep closing a dresser drawer and turning aside in agony from his yellow-star memorial on his wall: “Before people felt like they had a future again. By then, it was too late for my generation. Our hopes and dreams lie with our children. Every decision we made . . . Every sacrifice we gave . . . Was for their future.” This narrative gives way to the scenes of the family’s citizenship swearing-in ceremony, with the judge stamping their certificates and proclaiming (against a solid black panel), “Your journey has ended!” The next page, facing a solid black p. 245, shows an aircraft pulling together two land masses over the Pacific, turning the ocean into an hourglass shape (Goodwin noting that the image “[suggests] the strain the force needed to make the two sides meet, thus forming ‘Vietnamerica’”). The aircraft stitches the narrow passage between the northern and southern gulfs. This suturing image is followed by the chaotic unrolling of the family’s escape, introduced by Dzung, who is wiping her glasses: “We fled Vietnam on April 25, 1975, five days before the North’s tanks rolled into Saigon and claimed victory” (Tran 246). Her panel is superimposed on an overpowering wall of solid black, fringed by silhouetted palm trees, with a North Vietnamese tank charging forward, backlit by a sky in multiple shades of red, striated with black (247). The airport scene is a double splash panel, two facing pages, where the eye must roam restlessly, finding nothing, or everything, sifting through a chaos that resolves into black-and-white continuation of the family’s barely making it onto a plane, the aircraft doors slamming them in, a leaf blowing through the crack, making its way across three pages of blackness. As Goodwin observes, “the perspective at each stopping point is that of a prisoner, looking out from behind bars at a severely restricted view, an ironic contradiction to the text in those slices (“You’re safe now!” “Freedom.” “Liberty”). The exit scene (coming right after the triumphant “Your journey has ended!”) fades to black, resuming with the final scene in New York, with GB reading his father’s “A man without history” inscription and asking “Can I still go to Vietnam with you?”

And so GB has the literal last word in his memoir, but in response to his father and his mother. Thi also has the last word, but it is a culmination of much reflection, after having interviewed her parents over the years and now being ready to write, to relate the story. She recalls:

Bố admonishes, “Lock the door!” while Má tells them, “Always be the best in your class!” (Bui 296) But the lesson that goes deepest comes when the family has to evacuate the apartment because of a fire upstairs: Thi recalls, “This is the night I learned what my parents had been preparing me for my whole life . . . the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to RUN when the shit hits the fan. My Refugee Reflex” (304-05).

To a deeper degree than GB, Thi works to assign lasting meanings to her parents’ narratives, to ponder their implications for her, as well as for her son. She wonders:

“At least,” she reflects, “I no longer feel the need to reclaim a HOMELAND,” understanding that “the ground beneath [her] parents’ feet had always been shifting” (Bui 326). She worries whether she “would pass along some gene for sorrow . . . or unintentionally inflict damage [she] could never undo” (327). But the sight of her son at the beach, splashing and swimming fearlessly in the waves, provokes her to conclude, “I don’t see war and loss . . . or even Travis and me . . .” (327). In the final splash panel, of her son gliding underwater, she writes, “and I think maybe he can be free” (328). Bui’s conclusion is overtly hopeful in what she imagines for her son—not only based on what she herself has gone through, but her own continued acculturation. She is attached to a husband and to a growing child, and she clearly looks at the future, not only for her child, but for her students, many of whom are themselves immigrants.

At the time of his writing, Tran presents himself as unattached (although he would later marry and have children, his narrator at that time has not yet experienced the parental epiphany that Bui explores). His chronology—like memory, not linear—makes the novel seem to end just before the point at which he begins. He can keep working with the past and the future, and one may sense that unlike Bui’s narrator, his narrator has not yet reached a resting place. Still, as Rocío Davis observes, his cover art may suggest that he has continued to transform, as the inside and outside covers

* * *

In the healing of memories and in the coming to terms with oneself, with one’s blood, and with one’s nation (or nations), anamnesis is critical to moving forward. Romantic poet William Blake’s trope of innocence, experience, and higher innocence (a construct that is neither American nor Vietnamese) can provide a way into understanding both Tran’s and Bui’s resolutions. Blake holds that we are born innocent, trustful, positive, secure; that life inevitably throws us into the realm of experience, a world of loss, of fear, of death; and that we can be (but too often are not) touched by beauty, by art, by the transcendent joys that lead us into the world of higher innocence. In this higher innocence, we have left behind both naiveté and nihilism and, now awakened, are connected with our inner self and with the outer world. Initially naïve (or otherwise unaware) children, both GB and Thi, matured into Tran and Bui, take up the burdens of memory (their own and those of their parents and other informants) and reach a point where they can discern (in disparate ways) what to keep, what to box up and store away, and why it is important to open up the boxes and sift through again.