LOS ALAMITOS, Calif — Pages full of varying shades of burnt orange and black depict Thi Bui and her family’s journey immigrating from South Vietnam to America in the 1970s. In her memoir, Bui documents her family and the challenges of establishing a new life for themselves.
“The Best We Could Do” was introduced to Los Alamitos High School in the 2023-24 school year but was still considered a pilot book when taught to students in the 2024-25 school year. After several weeks of reading it, students stopped and transitioned to “All Quiet on the Western Front” or “Oedipus Rex.”
“The Best We Could Do” was paused, not banned, so that it may return for the 2025-26 school year. However, many feel that there should have been more transparency between educators and families over what happened to the book. This led many to assume that the book was pulled due to criticism over controversial pages that had already faced backlash, such as in 2022 by the Sunland-Tujunga Neighborhood Council, who advocated for “The Best We Could Do” to be banned from Los Angeles Public Libraries.
“Currently, the Supreme Court has multiple rulings on behalf of student rights but also on the right of libraries to build collections of diverse materials that serve the whole community and that isn’t censored because someone has different ideas,” Carolyn Foote, co-founder of the Texas FReadom Fighters, wrote in an email.
The memoir opens with the story of Bui giving birth to her son, which establishes the following chapters that highlight the economic disparity faced by her family before and after Bui’s birth; this includes scenes of her mother experiencing the death of many of her children shortly after their birth.
Once students reach higher levels of education, literature becomes more complex and even controversial. Themes of war, death and journeys of hope, among others, become prevalent ideas. Students are constantly consuming and analyzing various forms of literature in their English classes. These formative stories are impossible to tell without one scene, sentence, page or paragraph that can be taken out of context.
Following the removal of “The Best We Could Do,“ a community member, Stacy Muller, came to the Feb. 4, Los Alamitos Unified school board meeting and presented an image from a phone call scene in the graphic novel (shown in the photo gallery above).
At first glance, when Muller presented this page to the meeting audience, they probably assumed that LAHS was allowing students to read an explicit book and not being vigilant over reading materials as Muller had suggested.
“Here’s the problem: Parents don’t trust schools, and it’s understandable there’s been some nutty things going on. Parents are having a hard time trusting the district. I’m here. I want to help. I’m not here to get anybody in trouble or be mad at anyone; we need to work on this,“ Muller said to the board.
What wasn’t presented on the computer screen was that Bui was watched from a window by her neighbor who called the house when he saw that she was close to the phone. When she answered, he made sexual comments to her. Bui’s father, Bo, deduced what was happening and closed the windows.
Bui uses the incident to emphasize how Bo tried to explain what happened but reflects a theme of her childhood where things weren’t handled in a child-friendly manner.
Of course, it wasn’t just parents who were shocked by the book’s content. The humor students found in the book’s content was driven by shock that they were allowed to read the book. Not because it was explicit or inappropriate, but because it was shocking that it was an approved book, as students are aware that many people wouldn’t agree with students reading it.
“(‘The Best We Could Do’) was informative because it went into people’s lives during the war and their struggles,” LAHS sophomore Giselle Alonso said.
The removal of the graphic novel brings forth the question of what’s appropriate for students to read, what’s considered censorship versus age-appropriate material, especially when students are at an age when they see things and gossip about topics that parents likely wouldn’t approve.
“Once a child leaves home, they will encounter troubling ideas in the real world outside of school. It’s so much better if they’ve had the opportunity to reflect on those ideas with their own family or friends ahead of time, so they are more prepared to face whatever life circumstances they might encounter,” Foote said.
