To be honest Má didn’t look that good by the time I was aware of things like good looks.” The pictures that Bui sees of her mother did not match her own observations, observations which arose from a different perspective, as her mother’s child, not as her lover, friend, or student. The images make Bui think about the comment her mother’s student made, and she narrates, “I never looked this good. Each picture shows her mother looking into the camera, smiling, and posing. They become as “realistic” as possible within the context of the book. She depicts each one in a more realistic manner than she does the action in the graphic memoir. The initial panel on this page shows four photographs of Bui’s mother. This movement incorporates photographs, sketches, and illustrations, showing different modes of representing reality, and Bui’s narration points out how the first two modes function in the ways we think about the past. The photographs provide the glimpses into her mother’s past.Īfter the flashback to Việt Nam, Bui has a four panel page where she mixes old photographs or her mother, sketches that Bui, when she was younger, did of her mother, then a panel that fits the narrative of the novel depicting her brother and herself as children on the couch as her mother peels their fruit for them. She details an encounter with one her mother’s former students who, upon seeing Bui in the doorway, looks back to Bui’s mother, with a smile on her face, points to the door, and says, “She looks like you, but not as pretty.” Bui uses the initial picture to move from her sketch table to the trip to Việt Nam, highlighting the ways that the image or herself is enwrapped with the image she has of her mother but also highlighting that she does not know as much about her mother as she thinks she does. As she holds the image, she says, “People always say I look just like her.” Bui next takes us to Việt Nam when her and her mother went back. Following the opening panel, she focuses on herself holding a picture of her mother, as a child, lying on the ground on a beach with plants behind her.

The best we could do novel