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Kara Sha

Professor Patterson

Writing 2

8/30/2019
Intergenerational trauma in The Best We Could Do

In the book The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, she uses a graphic memoir to illustrate her

family history and the influence towards her. With the growth of her life, she felt the burden and

the distress between her and her family members. In the memoir, she chooses to trace the origin

of her family history to “make everything right”. She illustrates the historical events that

happened during her parents’ earlier life from a different perspective, which allows the readers to

have a different understanding from the typical historical perception. What does war bring to

people? Thi Bui intentionally brings up this question and makes the readers think critically from

this graphic memoir. As Vietnamese immigrants, Bui’s parents suffered from the chaos of the

war and the threat of death. The previous part of their life was filled with trauma caused by the

relentless chaos of the war. Even though she was too little when her family was seeking refugees

and escaping from Vietnam, her life was significantly influenced by this part of history. She

delicately raises the question to the readers about how her parents’ life experience influences her

and what does it mean for her own child. Thus, in the Book The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui

conveys the meaning of the intergenerational trauma from her own memoir with the following

possible influences towards her own newborn son.

The values towards life which Bui’s parents formed in their previous life also influences

their family relationships. The war made Bui’s parents value the survival and basic needs more

than anything else. Bui says “The unintentional ones came from their unexercised demons… and

from the habits they formed over so many years of trying to survive”(295-296, Bui). Bui’s
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parents are extremely sensitive to dangers and they have the almost intuitional reaction towards

the sense of danger and insecurity. As the fire accident happened in their American apartment,

their first reaction was to lock the door and hide in the bathroom(302-306. Bui). It is abnormal

among other people. Such a reaction was the habit they formed when they were hiding during the

war and seeking refugees. Furthermore, Bui’s parents don’t keep anything that might seem

meaningful in recording their children's’ life stages. They only keep, instead, the important

documents such as birth certificate, green card and so on. In their previous life, it seems like,

only those which maintains the basic needs of survival matters. However, their parents

unintentionally ignore the matter of their children’s feelings. Because in their eyes, they only pay

attention to the needs of survival. In chapter two, Bui maintains that “We live so close to each

other and yet feel so far apart” (39, Bui). What exactly made their relationship wrong? Bui’s

mother refuses to talk about her past to Bui. There’s always a burden between the way they

communicate about love. According to the study by Letzter-Pouw et al towards the offspring of

holocaust survivors and grandchildren of holocaust survivors, the offspring usually “perceived

transmission of burden from mother and father”(Sangalang and Wang). It is believed that those

children feel the burden of getting close to their parents during both their childhood and their

adulthood (Sangalang and Wang).

In Bui’s childhood, she grew up under the shadow of the fear of her parents. When her

mother went to work, she and her siblings would stay with his father who would bring scary and

inappropriate paintings to the house or tell scary stories to young children. Bui illustrates a

memory when she was young, a unanimous man called and spoke obscenely and indecently to

her (74-75, Bui). After she told her father, he did not respond in a way that normal parents would

do to protect their children. Instead, he got Bui to feel even more insecure. As the second
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generation of the war victims, Bui and her siblings witnessed her parents being the prisoners of

their own fear. According to Thane Rosenbaum, a second-generation writer, a second-generation

“witnesses to an uncompromising trauma that held the parents hostage,” In the research study

done at Sweden by Daud et al, “Children of traumatized parents showed significantly higher

levels of attention deficiency, depressive symptoms, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and

psychosocial stress ” (Sangalang and Wang). The stress and anxiety are unintentionally

transmitted from Bui’s father to her and her siblings. Bui’s father does not know how to protect

them and prevent them from getting hurt from his past. That anxiety and stress ultimately cause

his children’s mental health problems. In The Best We Could Do, Bui illustrates how her father’s

unintentional behavior causes her and her brother Tam to feel extremely insecure, which

furthermore, causes Tam to hide in the closet for hours when he was young (76-78, Bui). After

Bui asked his father about his childhood, she finally understood what this man had been through

when he was a little boy. Bui’s father suffered from hunger, massacre, hiding from the massacre,

incredible bad living conditions, and so on. She says “I had no idea that the terror I felt was only

the long shadow of his own” (129, Bui). Thus, those the worst experience that Bui’s father had

been through projected a long shadow of fear to his children. The transgenerational trauma is the

side product of the war.

When Bui suddenly has her own child, she questions herself about how to deal with the

transgenerational trauma. The author learns from her own experience that the sorrow and the

stress are from her parents’ past. She writes, “What has worried me since having my own child

was whether I would pass some gene for sorrow or unintentionally inflict the damage I could

never undo”(327, Bui). This worry of Bui is derived from her own experience and the damage

she suffered. She not only put herself in the shoes of her own mother but also the position as a
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victim of transgenerational trauma. It raises the question about the third generation. In Victoria

Aarons and Alan L. Berger’s Third-Generation Holocaust Representation, they maintain that the

third generation has the broken narrative, which they have to learn story piece by piece (6).

Unlike Bui’s parents, she learns the lesson that how her parents caused the terror for her. Bui

learns what to avoid when she raises her son. The third generation might be the generation that

gets protected. Those memoirs for them might just simply be pieces of stories from their

grandparents. Thus, at the end of the book, Bui says she doesn’t see any sorrow or shadow on her

son. Instead, she sees a new life. She writes at the very end, “and I think maybe he can be free”

(329, Bui). Thus, maybe the transgenerational trauma was ended by those second generation

which notices the issue and tries their best to love.

The trauma from the war not only damages those who actually involved but also their

children later on. What does war bring to people? It is a general question but transmitting a lot of

reflections. Whatever people suffered from the war would not only project the terror to the rest

of their lives but also to those who are closely connected to them such as their children. The

damage of transgenerational trauma cannot be undone but the second-generation might can

understand the issues from their own experience. Thus, they might protect their own children

from getting what they had from their parents. Thus, Thi Bui uses her story to tell the readers as

the second-generation of the war victims what is the best she could do, which corresponds with

the name of the book The Best We Could Do.

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Work Cited

Bui, Thi. The Best We Could Do. New York: Abrams. 2017.

Sangalang, Cindy; Vang, Cindy. Intergenerational Trauma in Refugee Families: A Systematic

Review. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 2017, 19.3, pp. 745-754.

Aarons, Victoria; Berger Alan L. Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History,

and Memory. Chicago: Northwestern University Press 2017.