The Refugee Journey In Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do

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The decision to leave one’s native country is a result of a wide variety of push factors, where war is no exception. Refugees have a unique migration experience, as seen through the Vietnamese refugees of the 1960s and 1970s. Refugees’ traumas lived in their war-torn home countries, follows and integrates into their everyday lives, even years following their flee. Specifically, refugees’ experiences and distress persist and influence family dynamics. This is seen in Thi Bui’s memoir, The Best We Could Do, where she shares not only what her family’s refugee journey was like from Vietnam to the United States, but also the implications it had on her family’s unit. Bui uses medias res, symbolism, and graphic weight to show how the turmoil of the refugee journey that her family had to endure, has manifested into the damage of …show more content…

The main coping mechanism, then, became suppressing of the memories and emotions attached to the traumas of the Vietnam Wars. Their home served as the host of these demons, but the demons impacted parenting styles. Thi acknowledges that her parents taught her and her siblings many lessons, some intentional but others, quite the contrary. It was the “unintentional ones [that] came from their unexorcised demons and from the habits they formed over so many years of trying to survive;”(“The Best We Could Do,” 295) these lessons were indeed unintentional because just like the suppressed communication, they derived weak communication between the parents and the children. In Min Zhou’s article “Are Asians Becoming ‘White’?” she concludes by including a picture of a Vietnamese family celebrating the 1998 Lunar Year, looking happy. This happy family in the article is much like the Bui family because on the outside, they appeared happy, but inside their home and their hearts, a darkness

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