Drawing Postmemory: Visual Testimony and the Afterlives of Refugee Trauma in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do

This article examines how Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do employs the formal resources of graphic narrative to represent intergenerational trauma, postmemory, and refugee history shaped by the Vietnam War and its aftermath. While trauma originates in the parents’ direct experiences of war, displacement, and forced migration, the memoir demonstrates that trauma persists beyond the first generation, becoming embedded in family dynamics, emotional atmospheres, and everyday survival practices. Drawing on trauma theory, postmemory studies, and comics scholarship, the article argues that Bui visualizes trauma not as a singular historical event but as an ongoing relational condition that structures parenting, communication, and identity across generations. Through close analysis of panel composition, color palettes, temporal fragmentation, and recurring motifs such as water, documents, and family portraits, the study shows how graphic narrative renders affective states and silences that resist linear narration. The article foregrounds how trauma is transmitted less through explicit storytelling than through embodied habits, emotional restraint, and refugee reflexes, aligning with the concept of postmemory as an affective and mediated inheritance. It further demonstrates how The Best We Could Do reconfigures graphic memoir as a site of ethical witnessing, positioning the reader as a co-witness to familial and historical trauma. By centering an Asian American woman’s refugee narrative, this study expands the predominantly Western canon of graphic memoir scholarship and challenges individual-centered models of trauma. It argues that Bui’s memoir exemplifies the graphic narrative’s distinctive capacity to visualize the afterlives of war—its recursive return in domestic life, its inscription in family relationships, and its potential transformation through acts of drawing, narration, and empathetic recognition.