The first time I read Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do (2017), I was caught up not only by the evocative and tragic aspects of her illustrated memoir but also the commonality among seemingly disparate groups. At the time, I worked in a community consisting of a large group of Haitians and Vietnamese, two groups I had not considered as sharing much in common other than their immigrant status. However, through this memoir, I learned that both groups historically share a language because both had been colonized by the French. For some reason, the knowledge that my French-speaking Haitian students could theoretically hold a conversation with my French-speaking Vietnamese students' grandparents intrigued me. The idea that language served as both a barrier (for my Vietnamese-American students who couldn't communicate with their grandparents) and an opening because of a shared language uniting two generations from different cultures really struck me. Similar to Celeste Ng's E...
One year, 52 reviews (more or less): My Cannonball Read Blog