Precarious Memories and Affective Relationships in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do

Abstract

The Best We Could Do is a multilayered feminist interrogation into the power of affective connections and knowledge for second-generation Vietnamese in the United States. I argue that Thi Bui’s illustrated memoir uses techniques of cotemporality, the intertwining of event and insidious trauma, and the performativity of memory through the visual technologies of maps and photographs to destabilize the rhetorics and realities of U.S. exceptionalism and assimilation. Her memoir questions the promise of freedom and refuses to adhere to a cultural politics of forgetting for those in the diaspora. The Best We Could Do recontextualizes intergenerational trauma, gender, and cultural identity, producing an alternative configuration of subjectivity, history, and futurity for Vietnamese diasporic subjects. In this way the text demands that readers interrogate the seemingly static images and discourses that inform our ideas of freedom, agency, and history in the post–Việt Nam War era and their impact on Vietnamese American futurity.

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