January-February 2019 her sense of dislocation from the events she portrays. By contrast, Bui is painfully aware of her first years in the US, evoked through images of enclosures, narrowing passageways, menacing tentacles of smoke from her father’s cigarettes, and water. Water appears here and throughout the narrative in the form of oceans, rivers, and flooded dreams, signaling both an overwhelming divide and a conduit for possible connection. As the narrator acknowledges, Bui’s engagement with her parents’ early lives and her own emerging sense of herself as a parent has deep roots in those difficult days. The movement across past, present, and future is most effectively communicated, however, through compositional similarities that establish affective links between Bui’s childhood experiences and her depiction of her parents’ lives in Vietnam prior to and during the Vietnam War. For example, Bui’s sensations of incarceration and her longing for freedom are echoed in images of her father as a child in similar postures of confinement and expansion. The transition to parenthood provides the narrative’s opening and closing note. Becoming a mother orients Bui differently toward the traumatized child who was, how she was always a part of her father even when he was terrifying, and it links her to her mother as a woman who gave birth and nurtured children in unbearable circumstances. Even with this newly achieved connection, however, the pain of these relationships is palpable. And as critical trauma studies scholar Maurice Stevens has noted, the dark inheritance of intergenerational trauma will persist until someone is brave enough to show up and feel the pain that has been so long disavowed. “Feeling the pain” is the difficult project Bui undertakes in The Best We Could Do, and she also accomplishes a powerful meditation on the way that trauma is transmitted in families and societies. Even more, Bui recruits readers to take up the work of feeling pain and reckoning with its manifestation in bodies, families, nations, and the howling sprawl of humanity. This devastating graphic memoir is all the more consequential, then, as a demand for feeling at a time when many are more invested in forgetting the realities of those who are displaced.

中文翻译：

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呼唤 El Tío Sam

2019 年 1 月至 2 月，她对所描绘的事件感到错位。相比之下，Bui 痛苦地意识到她在美国的最初几年，通过围栏、狭窄的通道、来自父亲香烟的烟雾和水的威胁触手的图像唤起。水以海洋、河流和被洪水淹没的梦的形式出现在这里和整个叙事中，标志着压倒性的鸿沟和可能的联系的管道。正如叙述者所承认的那样，Bui 与父母早年生活的接触以及她自己作为父母的新感觉在那些艰难的日子里有着很深的根源。跨越过去、现在和未来的运动得到最有效的沟通，然而，通过构成上的相似性，在 Bui 的童年经历与她对越南战争之前和期间在越南的父母生活的描述之间建立了情感联系。例如，Bui 被监禁的感觉和她对自由的渴望在她父亲小时候的形象中得到了呼应，这些形象与禁闭和扩张的姿势相似。向父母身份的过渡提供了叙述的开头和结尾。成为母亲让 Bui 以不同的方式看待受到创伤的孩子，即使他很可怕，她仍然是她父亲的一部分，这将她与她的母亲联系起来，因为她是一个在无法忍受的情况下生孩子和养育孩子的女人。然而，即使有了这种新建立的联系，这些关系的痛苦也是显而易见的。正如批判性创伤研究学者莫里斯史蒂文斯所指出的那样，代际创伤的黑暗传承将持续下去，直到有人勇敢地出现并感受到长期以来被否认的痛苦。“感受痛苦”是裴在《最好的我们能做的》中承担的艰巨项目，她还对创伤在家庭和社会中的传播方式进行了有力的思考。更重要的是，Bui 招募读者从事感受痛苦的工作，并思考其在身体、家庭、国家和人类的咆哮蔓延中的表现。因此，在许多人更加投入于忘记流离失所者的现实之际，这本毁灭性的图形回忆录更加重要，因为它是一种对感觉的需求。