Themes
When Ma returns from the hospital and procures a bigger tent and more comforting food, it could best be said to demonstrate this theme.
What is how home is a place we take with us?
The author of this book
Who is Thi Bui?
The basic unit of a graphic novel, each page typically contains multiple of these.
What is a panel/frame?
This event, which opens and closes the novel, sparks Thi’s interest in understanding her parents better.
What is the birth of Thi’s son?
This country was primarily responsible for the colonization of Vietnam.
What is France?
Ma and Bo are happy in a small town in Southern Vietnam until inflation starts to skyrocket and they’re forced to move back home.
What is how does history impact migration?
Studied at a French school until developing a sense of Vietnamese identity
Who is Ma?
The place in a panel where a reader’s eye is drawn due to shading, emphasis, or other artistic choices.
What is graphic weight?
This moment enables Thi to understand the moment for which her parents had been training her for her entire life.
What is a fire in the apartment building?
This country allied with the South Vietnamese during the Vietnamese civil war.
What is the United States?
When Thi makes it to the United States, her cousins feel ashamed of her because they are “fresh off the boat.”
What is assimilation?
Is a talented artist and incredibly intelligent, piloted a boat from Vietnam to Malaysia
Who is Bo?
The space between panels/frames.
What is a gutter?
This loss, due in part to bad parenting advice, would define Ma and permanently alter the relationship between Ma and Bo
What is the loss of their first born child?
This country occupied Vietnam during WWII.
What is Japan?
Thi travels to Vietnam to try and understand herself better, but she doesn’t recognize the buildings and the trip doesn’t stir up any special feelings for her.
What is memory?
The person Ma is most comfortable talking to
Who is Travis?
The word to describe when an image extends beyond the panel and towards the edge of the page.
What is bleed?
This event, which occurred three months before Thi’s birth, was memorialized in famous pictures and marked a permanent turning point in Ma and Bo’s life. However, Thi argues that this event is misunderstood and demonstrated wisdom and bravery rather than cowardice.
What is the surrender/fall of Saigon?
This is how the Vietnam War is known in Vietnam.
What is “The American War”?
Thi’s memoir is itself an example of this. Her story is redefining stereotypes and reclaiming the narrative of Vietnamese immigration.
What is visibility as resistance?
When this character moved in with her boyfriend, Ma tried to commit suicide
Who is Bich?
Panels that transition to a new time or place
What is scene to scene transition?
This event would help connect Thi to Ma, as Thi understood for the first time the singular focus of having a purpose that is to keep someone else alive, even if all you can do is your best.
What is the continued hospitalization of her son for jaundice?
After the Vietnam War, those who collaborated with the Americans were known by this derogatory term that means "suspicious"?
What is nguy?