'It's really hard to sit your parents down and say 'Tell me all about your painful history,' but if you tell them, 'I'm working on a book, could you help me with my school project,' then they'll oblige. She says telling them she was writing a book about their lives helped break the ice. So Bui interviewed the closest sources she had - her parents. so I had this kind of heaviness that I grew up with, and I wanted to make sense of the stories. I'd heard a lot of the stories growing up, and the stories were pretty heavy. 'I was a graduate student at NYU, deconstructing all of the bad representations of Vietnamese people in the Vietnam War in movies and pop culture and American scholarship, so it was a very academic grumpiness that I had at the beginning.' She says the novel began with a grad school project. I meet up with Bui outside the San Diego Convention Center, as people in costumes rush to line up for more panels, and men ring bells on ice cream carts. Her parents lost nearly everything during the war, and ended up fleeing Vietnam in the late 1970s, when Bui was just a small child. 'I'm going to try to entertain you before I make you sad.' And her story is sad. 'There are several voices and I would like to not do them all,' she says. How?Īlone on stage for her spotlight panel at the convention, Bui invites audience members to come up and read passages from her novel. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Best We Could Do Author Thi Bui

This is the best we could do