This truly is “a book to break your heart and heal it” as the testimony says. Thi Bui who is a school teacher living in California narrates the story of her immigrant Vietnamese family with such intensity and earnestness that has to be relatable to most immigrants. Even to those who are not immigrants, this personal story has to be relatable because it is the story of a young person making sense of her parents. So that she could understand them and relate to them better. Her family was part of “the boat people” who left Vietnam for the United States to escape post-war unrest in the late 1970s. “Every casualty in war is someone’s grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, brother, sister, child, lover.” The graphic novel format is used to wonderful advantage while describing the course of Vietnam war and how it affected the lives of three generations before her. The format also allows quick bits of humor that cut the intensity and the tragedy of some parts of the story in a way that the reader’s mind and heart allows and accepts the pain without shutting it out. When you read it, you can tell why it took her almost fifteen years to figure out a way to present her family’s complicated story and the impact it had on her life.

Life in the United States was tough in their initial years until she and her siblings go to college and figure out their way around. Shadows of past trauma continue to haunt her parents in different ways, leaving Thi and her siblings wondering why. Something snaps in place when they make their first family trip back to Vietnam when she is in her mid-twenties. She starts “interviewing” her parents and starts to compile the story that was previously wrapped in a deep mysterious time warp. The result is this very engaging book and a life story. I do not want to give away too much more. The book is unputdownable and makes you want to read it again and again. And you might never look at an immigrant family the same way again as you did before.