Bui has publicly stated that it is important to her and her family that the novel be 'good for the Vietnamese people,' and that motivated her parents to reveal their hardships in the novel.

Bui also focuses on how members of her family will remember the same events differently, and the differences can be based on the person's gender, class, politics, life experiences, etc. In telling her parents' story, Bui offers a different narrative about the Vietnam War from the one usually seen in American films and textbooks. It also touches on important themes such as historical memory and narrative. The novel touches on many themes, including family, parenthood, belonging, the meaning of home, and the importance of education. Bui claims she was inspired by other autobiographical graphic novels like Art Spiegelman's Maus and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. For the next ten years, she trained herself to draw comics and developed the novel. She wanted to share her work on a larger scale.

Bui shared her family's history in the thesis project, but that work was ultimately only available to her family and her graduate school advisor and peers. According to Bui, under the umbrella of academic work and oral history, she began having long and difficult conversations with her parents about topics that were uncomfortable for them to share. The idea for the novel began when Bui was working on her Master's thesis and conducted oral history interviews with her parents. It chronicles Thi Bui's parents' life before and during the Vietnam War, their escape from Vietnam when Bui was a child, and their eventual migration to the United States as refugees. The Best We Could Do is a 2017 illustrated memoir written by Thi Bui.

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui