Parents
The author flat-out states it in the narrative, but it is a made manifest through the recurring imagery of the drawings in this graphic memoir: her parents are “a symbol to me—two sides of a chasm, full of meaning and resentment.” Older at this point than her parents were when they family escape Vietnam, the experience has the post-traumatic effect of de-aging her, forcing an unwanted regression into being a child again that is distinctly at odds with the role she plays in their lives now as caretaker.
Vietnam
Thi Bui is very young when the family is forced to flee for safety from the oppression regime of the new communist government now ruling what was South Vietnam. As a result, although the country and the war and the culture as important to her, it is in a disconnected way that differs substantially from other members of the family. Vietnam is less an actual place she was born and briefly lived than it is a symbol of a life that might have been. The fact that this might-have-been was lost forever due in large part to the decision by her adopted country to withdraw its forces and essentially surrender to an enemy for the first time in its history only serves to make the symbolic status of her homeland all the more complex.
“Saigon Execution”
The section of the memoir dealing with the famous photo known as “Saigon Execution” is also quite complex. It is one of the most famous photos ever taken and its subject—a member of the South Vietnam military summarily execution a member of the enemy without a trial—influenced the tide of growing opposition to America’s continued involvement in the war. Long afterward, however, the truth becomes revealed: the general takes such questionable action because the prisoner was known to have murdered an entire family. It is this complexity of morality captured in a single frozen moment that symbolizes the full extent of the political situation in both North and South Vietnam where both sides were represented by authoritarian political interests, but one side benefited simply because the other side’s ideology did not align with United States policy.
Má
The personal biography of the author’s mother is one which transforms her stoic personality into a symbol of sacrifice. Má’s ambitions to become a doctor are sacrificed literally on the altar of marriage to a man whose tuberculosis she assumed would soon make a widow and return her freedom. Instead, Thi’s father survives and the marriage continues as Má’s professional dreams are surrendered to the oppression of expectations as surely as that of South Vietnam itself.
The Ocean
The ocean is equally complex as a symbol. As member of that collective group of refugees fleeing the oppression of the communists after the south falls to the invading troops from the north, the vast sea before them is endowed with contradictory symbolic meanings. On the one hand, it is a terrifying threat that poses the very real danger of instant death at any moment. Beneath that immediacy of danger, however, lies a thicker level of symbolism as the agency of freedom. The water is the only pathway to escape and since going back it equitable with death, the gamble becomes greater than the risk.
