Leaving His Body:
By: Ngọc Trâm Nguyễn
Tags: American Dream, Refugees, War, Vietnam, Migrants

The Impossibility of the American Dream in The Best We Could Do

Thi Bui in The Best We Could Do uses the form of a graphic novel to describe her family’s journey as refugees of the Vietnam War and their adjustments with life in the U.S. in their newfound Vietnamese-American bodies. Perhaps less explicitly stated in the graphic novel is the discourse on the expected American Dream, the journey towards achieving that dream and its implications, and a radical uproot of that dream through the narrative of refugees. Bui shares as she begins the memoir: “My parents escaped Vietnam on a boat so their children could grow up in freedom” (Bui 30). It’s a sentiment of liberation, gratitude, and the promise of a better tomorrow that is known all too well for many refugees and migrants. In chapter three “Feeling Asian/American: Ambivalent Attachments in Asia Diasporic Narratives” of Racial Feelings, Jeffrey Santa Ana analyzes different cultural forms, such as fiction, graphic narrative, film, and advertising to examine the negative impact of the aspirational U.S. capitalism and multiculturalism. He asserts that the American Dream that arises from upward mobility and economic success is a desire that is rooted in wanting to “feel normal, a yearning to belong in neoliberal America without regard to race, ethnicity, and national origin” (Santa Ana 129). Thus, Santa Ana argues that the pursuit of this very American Dream calls for refugees to “negate origins and forget the past” to be as connected to American culture as possible (Santa Ana 148). Jeffrey Santa Ana’s analysis of the American Dream lends itself well to an interpretation of Thi Bui’s graphic memoir — that despite moving away to distant land in hopes of “making [their own way” (Bui 292), it is nearly impossible for Bui and her family members to erase the homeland and all sentiments connected with it, further denouncing the unrealistic American Dream.

The American Dream has long been associated with freedom, happiness, and a sense of home and belonging. It remains constitutive of the Asian American experience — what it means to lead a life with wealth, well-being, and comfort. To get there, the Asian American individual must embrace U.S. liberal democracy, have deep faith in the promises of “equality and equivalence under citizenship — faith in the normative aspiration to belong as ordinary Americans” (Santa Ana 125). However, as Jeffrey Santa Ana notes, there exists a certain “tension between accommodating the ideal of belonging as an ordinary person in America’s color-blind society and maintaining attachments to ethnic identity, [resulting in] the Asian American subject’s ambivalence” (Santa Ana 126). Consequently, when this ambivalence becomes much to endure, the subject chooses one identity over the other. The fine balancing act that seems so fundamental to being an Asian individual in America becomes the active erasure of one’s past — the trauma, the joy, the tradition, and all the moments in-between. Santa Ana reflects that this causes the “immobility” of Asian Americans and proves the American Dream to be a myth, an impossibility that cannot be achieved in a racialized America (Santa Ana 128).

Members of the Asian American diaspora experience this failure of the American Dream differently. In the particular narrative of the Vietnamese diasporic subjects, it can be easy to mark them as embodiments of the neoliberal ideology of assimilation that function through a willful forgetting of the violence that brought them to American shores in the first place. Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, however, affectively allows the readers to interpret the contrary. She intervenes in the impossible narrative of the American Dream by highlighting how the pressures that amass differently impact Vietnamese men, women, and children during and after relocation and resettlement. As she states in the beginning of the graphic novel: “I keep looking toward the past, tracing our journey in reverse over the ocean, through the war, seeking an origin story” (Bui 38–41). The memoir itself can be perceived as an act of defiance against the imagined state of the American Dream. To showcase the impossible nature of the American Dream that demands a letting go of the past, Bui closely details the stories of herself and her family, whose experiences are not used as promotions to fit within narratives of U.S. citizenship and history, but rather as complex subjects laced with loss, trauma, and hope. In particular, Bui’s father, or as she lovingly calls him, Bố, is the most salient example of the impossibility of the American Dream. While her mother, or Má’s, life has been marked with wealth and prestige since a young age and a great sense of sacrifice and ambition that continues even through her stay in the United States, her father’s life is riddled with despair and brokenness. He is unassimilable to the American Dream standards because his past is written all over him. His standoffishness is evidence of childhood trauma, and a lack of family ties leaves him a subject of Bui’s fear and curiosity throughout the memoir.

Once in the United States and released from daily life in Vietnam, Bui’s father becomes paranoid and depressed. The narrative of Bố “leaving his body” at night in his sleep shows his projection pointing toward Vietnam, his roots, something that he was supposed to forget but could not do so (Bui 85). One splash page substitutes Nam’s boyhood silhouette for the coastline of Vietnam, centering his profile on the page as if drifting in the churning waters of the Pacific Ocean (Bui 85). Bui writes that Bố has spirits who possess him at night, and when these moments of recurring trauma are not in his head, he manifests them through the way he spends time with Bui and her brother in their youth. As she describes, he used to smoke, lash out at them, or play with them on occasions as he was at home taking care of them. No matter what he is doing, his physical presence seems to be there, but his mind is elsewhere. He is drawn wearing a white t-shirt with cigarette smoke coming from his mouth. He sits all day, watching as the children interact with one another. His hair is disheveled, and his eyes are aloof yet focused, as if he is always in his head thinking about something (Bui 72). The only time Bố comes alive is when he tells scary stories to Bui and her brother. He transforms into somebody animate, with hand motions leading and adding to his stories (Bui 73). These stories become one of Bố’s only modes of reconnecting with his Vietnamese roots, his own special way of escaping the present and leaning into the past.

Through the narrative of Bui’s father, the American Dream is refuted, continuing to be an impossibility that no one can reach. While Bố stands out as the epitome of the far-reaching nature of the American Dream, it is not to say that Má, the author, or any of her siblings are perfectly assimilable and immune to their past. For each character throughout the graphic novel, their trauma manifests differently; no matter how far they might travel, home will always find a way to haunt them. But what happens when memory is on the run, demanding to be compiled neatly and pushed back? Bui demonstrates this craving to run away from the past through the story of her family’s adjustment to the new house in California. With their own apartment and slow habits built over time to make their integration easier, Bui remarks that they have finally “built a bubble… a home” for themselves (Bui 294). Interestingly, as the family constructs what seems to be a perfect new beginning for themselves, they are making an active effort to destroy all that was of them, keeping “sparse records of [their] existence” (Bui 296). In a brown file folder, they have their most important possessions there — their birth certificates, green cards, and Social Security cards. This convenient rendering of their identity is a way to assemble their lives neatly, disregarding the messes that still hold true of them but are not revered in American society and simplifying their experiences to be more palatable for a white America. In other words, this small brown folder that constitutes their Vietnamese identity is an attempt to live the American Dream, pushing away past self and memories and trying to take a step forward.

Despite vehement efforts to stay on the run and disregard the past, it is not possible for Bui nor her family members to detach nor divorce themselves from their identity. One way or another, where each family member came from — the messes, the trauma, the joys, the gratitude — lingers, leaving it once again impossible to keep up with the American Dream. When Bui’s family house is lit on fire due to the old couple downstairs lighting up cigarettes and falling asleep, the family runs, leaving almost all their possessions behind but taking with them that small brown folder of who they truly are. The identity that they skillfully compressed, and ultimately suppressed, is the same identity that they cannot run away from. The brown folder, no matter how small it is, will be in their hands, running with them through fires, across the oceans and seas, and in life. This is further made clear when Bui uses the term “refugee reflex” to describe her family’s reaction to the fire (Bui 305). This term explains her instinct to flee at the face of danger, something that developed naturally being a refugee who should be ready to face any sort of atrocities at any point of time. The refugee reflex implies a haunting, a scarring from past experiences that one can never recover from and will continue to pass on through generations.

Such language around roots passed through generations and scarring that knows no boundaries of space and time can be discouraging, especially when it comes to reaching for that American Dream that many refugees and migrants are yearning for in a new land. It is not to say, however, that it is impossible to disconnect with the roots and break the chain. At the same time that Bui herself experiences a refugee reflex, she is conscious as to raise her son in a way that prioritizes freedom from the burden of the past. As she reflects at the end of the graphic novel: “What becomes of us after we die? Do we live on in what we leave to our children? How much of ME is my own, and how much is stamped into my blood and bone, predestined?” (Bui 324). Perhaps the self-awareness of the possibility of a past that defines her will help her break free from that past. But this very discourse on Thi Bui’s ethnic memory and history itself further allows readers to interpret The Best We Could Do as a paramount link to Santa Ana’s discourse on the impossibility of the American Dream. For Bui, it is not a matter of whether the roots live within her or not — that is a given; rather, it is a matter of how she handles the knowledge and feelings possessed through those roots. The American Dream, the promise of economic and social prosperity and uplift, proves to be out of reach for Bui and many other Vietnamese-American refugees, who cannot deny their past selves. The narratives of Bố leaving his body and Bui’s family reaction to the fire in The Best We Could Do show that the American Dream might not be the end goal of these journeys of mobility. Even when their feet are constantly shifting, they are paralyzed, stuck in the past. But even when their soul is leaving their body to try to tap into the past, they could still keep trying — doing the best they could do.