The Best We Could Do

“I’m in labor. The pain comes in twenty-foot waves and Má has disappeared. In her place my husband Travis steps in […] Má flew all the way from California to help me have her first grandchild. But now that she’s here, she can’t bear to be in the same room.” 

These are the opening lines of the book, and they set forth the book’s thematic skeleton. As Thi struggles with bringing her firstborn into the world, she purposefully highlights her mother’s presence (or, here, her absence). Giving birth to her own son brings Thi both further away from and closer to her mother. It brings her closer to her mother through the shared experience of motherhood, and through the new empathy that Thi can feel for her. However, it takes Thi away from her mother in the sense that Thi becomes very definitively an adult. The parallel between her experience and her mother’s—as well as how their experiences diverge from each other—all tied together through the notion of birth and new life, is a major thematic mechanism. Through this triad, Bui forwards her assertion that the life of a family is a mixture of both repeating cycles and the traversing of new territory.  

“Má leaves me but I’m not alone, and a terrifying thought creeps into my head. Family is now something I have created—and not something I was born into.” 

In this quote, Thi describes the anxiety that becoming a mother breeds within her. Torn between seeking comfort from her mother and filling the new role of mother herself, she wrestles with not viewing the responsibility of family-building as merely something she was subjected to while growing up as a child within a family, but a step forward for which she bears the entire adult responsibility.