Thi Bui: Cartoonist And Activist
Last week I had the privilege to meet Eisner Award-nominated cartoonist Thi Bui and hear about the struggles that she and her family faced -- in both the events leading up to, during, and in the wake of the Vietnam War -- to come to America in her graphic memoir -- The Best We Could Do. She was born just a few months before the end of the war -- her life already cast into disarray by events far outside her and her family’s control. Bui and her family arrived in the United States in 1978 as a part of the “Boat People”; A phrase that she chooses to use as an endearing part of a much larger story than as the scarlet letter that some parts of American society deemed it to be at the time.
From ‘The Best We Could Do’
She was welcomed on stage by a member of the Asian American Student Association at the University of Utah. She touched briefly on her education and past, also placing in personal anecdotes to the familiarity of her work to their own life. Bui then stepped on stage and opened up with a reading of a current piece about a humanities issue that’s very close to her heart -- the refugee crisis. The piece was similar in style to The Best We Could Do, but told a much different story. It began with a mountain and a phrase detailing the absurdities across the world in the grand scheme of things. The next slide kept the mountain but was now accompanied by a beach and lapping waves; it talked about how, despite the vastness of the world and all her problems, the problems at home still matter. Finally, the last slide was of a boy, face-down on the beach. The poster child, if you will, of the current refugee crisis. She discussed the weight of the survivor's guilt she carried. “Why me,” she asked. “Why did I survive and he didn’t?”.
Bui decided that it was best not to end on a somber note and took to a reading of her work. She invited many audience members up to the front to take roles as her characters along with her as the narrator. It was lightened the mood and allowed Bui to transition into how the piece was created. It started as a graduate project during her time at NYU in an attempt to shed some light on the stereotypes of “Boat People” and give more substance to the diaspora of the Vietnamese population. It was difficult for Bui to begin, though, for it required her to ask many difficult questions to the best source of this information -- her parents. As she puts it, “It’s hard to sit your parents down and ask ‘Tell me all about your painful history,’. She said they only obliged because it was for a school project, and what better way to get an Asian parent to participate than to say it’s for school? To this day her mom claims that her the accuracy of the information and the events in the memoir are 99.9% true.
Bui is currently teaching as the MFA professor in Comics program at the California College of Arts. Her talents can be further appreciated as the illustrator of A Different Pond by Bao Phi.
