Let's Peel
The Best We Could Do
Created by
PERFECT if
Perfect if you want to understand exile as inheritance, and how love survives even when language doesn’t.
Style / Atmosphere
Watercolour remembrance. Soft washes of sepia and grey flow across fine ink lines; history ripples like light through old film. Every page feels hand-held — a memoir that breathes.
Synopsis
“The past doesn’t go away. It just becomes another country you visit in your sleep.”
The Best We Could Do follows Bui’s family from war-torn Vietnam to their new life in the United States. Through her drawings, she maps not only the journey across oceans but the internal geography of parents and children learning one another again. The result is both personal and collective: the refugee story told through tenderness rather than trauma.
Line Work
Fine ink outlines, cross-hatched restraint, and a cool blue wash give each frame the stillness of archival memory. The geometry comforts and confines — a hand trying to stay steady while remembering trembles.
The pacing
Carefully measured. Each panel holds its breath. Page turns feel like walking through long hallways: you sense the echo before the sound. Time folds in on itself — moments revisited from multiple angles until they align.
The Voice
Bechdel’s narration overlays the images like transparent vellum — analytical, ironic, tender. Text and image never mirror; they negotiate. Where her voice retreats, her drawings lean closer.
From Page
to Screen
Fun Home: A New Broadway Musical (2013, dir. Sam Gold) — a stage adaptation that turns Bechdel’s visual silence into song.
The comic’s symmetrical structure and literary layering influenced how Call Me by Your Name (2017, dir. Luca Guadagnino) and The Father (2020, dir. Florian Zeller) visualise memory as architecture — intimate rooms echoing with withheld truths.
Peel me a Book
Let's Peel
The Best We Could Do
Created by
Style / Atmosphere
Watercolour remembrance. Soft washes of sepia and grey flow across fine ink lines; history ripples like light through old film. Every page feels hand-held — a memoir that breathes.
Perfect if
Perfect if you want to understand exile as inheritance, and how love survives even when language doesn’t.
Synopsis
“The past doesn’t go away. It just becomes another country you visit in your sleep.”
The Best We Could Do follows Bui’s family from war-torn Vietnam to their new life in the United States. Through her drawings, she maps not only the journey across oceans but the internal geography of parents and children learning one another again. The result is both personal and collective: the refugee story told through tenderness rather than trauma.
Line Work
Loose, expressive brush lines. Watercolour tones evoke memory more than realism — blurred edges, breath-like transparency. The drawings are emotional temperature rather than documentation.
The pacing
Fluid, rhythmic, dreamlike. Transitions flow like waves; flashbacks and present time overlap seamlessly. Reading it feels like listening to a family conversation that drifts between generations.
The Voice
Gentle, questioning, reflective. Bui narrates with empathy for everyone involved — parents, children, even history itself. Her voice is both witness and balm, never didactic, always searching.
From Page
to Screen
No direct adaptation, but its intergenerational tenderness finds cinematic kinship with The Scent of Green Papaya (1993, dir. Tran Anh Hung) and Minari (2020, dir. Lee Isaac Chung) — films that turn migration into quiet, sensory poetry.