As a result, members of the Vietnamese diaspora had the chance to return freely to their ancestral land, in many cases after a painful and prolonged absence. After twenty years of embargo, the two former enemies reestablished trade links and removed the restrictions imposed on travels. In 1995, the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam restored diplomatic relations.

Intersecting theories of comics studies, Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity, and Susan Sontag’s and Roland Barthes’s writings on photography, this paper analyzes the role of photography in relationships between personal memory and collective memory, family history and cultural history. By reproducing instead of including the photographs themselves, Bui establishes a conflict with this notion of existence, reflecting a sense of displacement as a Vietnamese refugee caught between two countries, as well as examining the unreliability of her own memories. For Bui and her family, six Vietnamese refugees among thousands, photographs served not simply as proof of identity, but as proof of existence. In an attempt to reconcile her identities as a daughter, a refugee, and a mother, Bui recounts her family’s history by creating a visual narrative, using a combination of her parents’ recollections, her own memory, and drawn reproductions of source family and war photographs. Twenty-seven years after her family flees to America from Vietnam as refugees of the war, Thi Bui gives birth to her son, leading her to revisit her relationship to the war through the stories and memories of her parents.

The best we could do review