The best we can do

 The book starts with the author Thi Bui giving birth to her son, which instantly makes her think about her mother's past and the meaning of being a parent, so she starts looking backward in the story. Chapter 3 focuses on her difficult US childhood: at her family's small apartment in San Diego, which functioned as a "holding pen" of pain and fear for her immigrant parents, particularly from her father, Bo, an angry man telling her scary stories, while her mother, Ma , worked in a factory. For her father's fears to be understood, the action moves further into his youth in Vietnam during Chapter 4, unfolding his deep trauma from the difficult childhood he had marked by famine, abandonment by his father, and a massacre of local villagers by French soldiers at age seven, which explains his later paranoia. Chapter 5 was devoted to Ma’s story, which was far more comfortable: she grew up in a wealthy family, and was driven by an idea that education equaled freedom and that she did not want to marry; however, she eventually met Bo at a teacher's college, married only after she got pregnant and Bo was gravely ill, and thus comes the narrative to their challenging early years just before their eventual escape from Vietnam. 

The book begins with author Thi Bui giving birth to her son, which instantly makes her think about her mother's past and the meaning of being a parent, so she starts looking backward in the story. Chapter 3 focuses on her difficult US childhood: at her family's small apartment in San Diego, which functioned as a "holding pen" of pain and fear for her immigrant parents, particularly from her father, Bo,  an angry man telling her scary stories, while her mother, Ma, worked in a factory. For her father's fears to be understood, the action moves further into his youth in Vietnam during Chapter 4, unfolding his deep trauma from the difficult childhood he had marked by famine, abandonment by his father, and a massacre of local villagers by French soldiers at age seven, which explains his later paranoia. Chapter 5 was devoted to Ma’s story, which was far more comfortable: she grew up in a wealthy family, and was driven by an idea that education equaled freedom and that she did not want to marry; however, she eventually met Bo at a teacher's college, married only after she got pregnant and Bo was gravely ill, and thus comes the narrative to their challenging early years just before their eventual escape from Vietnam.