The Best We Could Do

Hắng found the family an apartment as quickly as possible upon their arrival in California. She began working on an assembly line for $3.33 an hour. The adults soon construct a haven for their family within in their apartment. Thi writes, “They taught us to be respectful, to take care of one another, and to do well in school. Those were they intended lessons. The unintentional ones came from their unexorcised demons, and from the habits they formed over so many years of trying to survive” (295).

Thi recounts that the family kept all their important documents in plain brown folders, and were always ready to flee, which they proved by expeditiously leaving their apartment with their important documents when a fire broke out in a nearby unit. Thi and her siblings also excelled academically, while Hắng began to study mechanical drafting and Nam graphic design. Lan and Bích would come home to watch Thi and Tám on days when the parents were in class, and Thi loved listening to them tell bedtime stories from The Iliad, as well as the peculiar feeling she got from being in the apartment parent-free. 

This chapter returns us to Berkeley 2005, to the time period immediately following Thi’s son’s birth. Thi reflects, writing, “There were so many things I didn’t know about being a parent until I became one” (307). She and Travis struggled through many firsts, and their son’s jaundice, which forced them to rent a room across the street from the hospital while their son stayed for further treatment. Learning to breastfeed him unassisted was also a saga. During this time, Thi also asks her mother to tell her about how she dealt with Quyên’s sickness. Hắng recalls the one smile that the baby gave to her before she died: “like she was making [Hắng] a gift of [their] last moment together” (310). The last panel on the page shows Thi hugging and comforting her mother.

Over an illustration of Nam steering the boat that they escaped from Vietnam on and of Hắng laboring within the hammock that was used to take her out of the refugee camp, Thi ruminates: “That first week of parenting was the hardest week of my life, and the only time I ever felt called upon to be heroic” (312). Pages 314-15 depict a weeping Thi speaking in Vietnamese to her son, referring to herself using the Northern naming convention: “Mẹ” instead of the Southern-style “Má.” Thi realizes that her mother always wanted her children to call her “Mẹ,” the “weighty, serious, more elegant word for ‘Mother’ used in the North” (316). However, Thi writes, “we preferred the Southern word ‘Má,’ a jolly, bright sound we insisted fit her better” (316). Thi wonders how she’d react if her son did something similar to her. She reflects that her new motherhood means that she is no longer a child—and that she also no longer has any leeway to dwell on the resentments that she has toward her parents.

Thi has come to accept the impermanence of life, and she no longer imagines “that history had infused [her] parents’ lives with the dust of a cataclysmic explosion […] that […] had seeped through their skin and become part of their blood” (324). Now, she realizes that, while her life is not entirely singular and unique, it is still a great gift. She has let go of her longing for a real homeland, realizing that Việt Nam was in such upheaval by the time she was born, and she “was only a small part of it” (326). While Thi confesses that even though she once worried that she’d pass along “some gene for sorrow” to her child, when she looks at him now, at 10 years old, “[she] doesn’t see war and loss, or even Travis and [herself]. [She] sees a new life, bound with [hers] quite by coincidence, and [she thinks] that maybe he can be free” (329).