Of course, these seemingly disparate facts of life (war and birth, for instance) are shown to be intimately linked together, and the blood-metaphor that underpins the entire story, that we might say haunts the text, is one of the main mechanisms through which Bui shows this connection. The Best We Could Do is a beautiful example through which to explore this topic, as Thi Bui uses her blood-coloured wash to explore a particular set of complexities around stories of immigration that involve blood, both literally (the Vietnam war, the blood present at the scene of birth) and figuratively (family lines, ethnicity, ethnic cleansings, racism). Here, I’m interested in how the single-color wash effect can also be used to further the story. I’ve written about how Alison Bechdel uses a single-colour wash to add depth of field in her first memoir, Fun Home, and how Nicole Georges move between scenes with and without the single-color wash effect to establish a relationship between two timelines in her memoir, Calling Dr. Single-color washes of the sort that Bui employs (generally, not in the sense of resembling blood) are currently a common trend in graphic memoir. Or, aside from the endpapers, the single-colour wash looks an eerie amount like blood, to the point that I was sometimes made uncomfortable by it.

Turn the page, and you’ll find that even on the “preface” page the tone of the text has been greatly altered: here, the page has been washed in a rusty tone, and given a water-color effect that gives the impression of drops of colour that have dissipated by spreading outward as they’ve soaked into the page.

The effect of the opening endpapers, to which the reader turns from the cover image of a cable-stayed bridge that is possibly San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate is an overall affect of stillness and calm. The endpapers of Thi Buy’s The Best We Could Do are coloured in a wash of a sky blue hue, and depict a beach scene: shells of several sizes are scattered about, along with a pair of sandals.

The best we could do novel