THI BUI

Cartoonist & Refugee Rights Activist

↶ Refugees

Thi Bui (Gabe Clark/NPR)

Thi Bui (Paulo Chun/NBC)

Thi Bui’s Twitter Profile Picture

VIETNAM → USA 1978

“Understanding that your perspective is not the entire truth is an important stepping stone to getting there.”

”I didn’t realize we were going to go back to the early 1980s, where immigrants are being demonized and treated as something we need to be afraid of”

— Thi Bui

Thi Bui wrote and illustrated The Best We Could Do (2018), a graphic memoir recounting the story of her family. Bui's family fled Vietnam when she was a young child, during the Vietnam War, and resettled in America.

Thi Bui was born in Vietnam three months before the end of the Vietnam War. Her family escaped the country in 1978, fleeing to the United States in the wave of refugees known as “Boat People.” She became a high school teacher, opening a first-of-its-kind high school in Oakland specifically for refugee and recent immigrant students. Thi earned an MFA from New York University, and published her first graphic novel, The Best We Could Do, in 2018.

During the violence and political upheaval that followed the end of the Vietnam War, Thi Bui’s parents sold their valuables, put three-year-old Thi in the small cargo hold of a river boat, and left Vietnam. 800,000 people left the war-torn country by sea between 1975 and 1979. This wave of refugees, called Boat People, faced many dangers—starvation, dehydration, pirates, drowning—to find new homes. Thi Bui and her family found their new home in the United States.

Thi Bui grew up watching bad representations of her story in movies and pop culture. She wanted to tell a real story about the Vietnam War, one that wove together her family’s experiences with the political and historical narratives of Vietnam. Thi spent hours listening to her parents talk about life in their home country. At first, her questions were centered around herself, but the more she tried to imagine what her parents must have been thinking and feeling, the more interesting her questions got. She learned about the weather the day they left, what it felt like on the beach, whether her parents were hungry. Talking to her parents about their escape was important for her book, but it was also, as Thi puts it, “a very sneaky way of spending quality time with my parents on my terms.”

Now that she’s written a story about her own refugee experience, Thi is writing stories about people whose refugee experiences do not match hers. She wants to challenge the “model minority” stereotype that Asian Americans are often painted with—the notion that Asian immigrants to America are always successful and perfect. Thi tells stories of people who are in prison, in detention centers, who are waiting to be deported, people who didn’t have nice, neat, successful immigrant stories. She is also working on a book about climate change in the Mekong Delta, where the ground is only six feet above sea level, and farmers are already having problems with salt water getting into their soil.

Thi Bui writes stories for people like her: people who grew up in the United States, who have strong cultural ties to their country of origin, and want to know more about how they got here. She believes that it is important for the 1.5 Generation of immigrants to tell their own stories, because they are different than their parents’. Their stories are often more complicated and difficult than the classic immigrant success story, where the parents work really hard and sacrifice everything so that their children can have an amazing life. Thi Bui wants to bring that narrative down to earth, make it messier and more honest, and ultimately more relatable.

THI BUI

Further Reading