For most of his life, Thien Pham’s memories of coming to America existed as a blur, only vague snippets of key moments, from the boat out of Vietnam to the refugee camp in Thailand to, eventually, the quiet suburbs of San Jose.

“I knew that pirates had stopped us and robbed us, but I didn’t know that, for example, there were rings of pirates,” the Oakland-based graphic novelist explained. “We were attacked multiple times.”

His fragmentary perspective is partly represented by entirely blacked-out pages in his new graphic novel, “Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam.” They depict a 4-year-old boy closing his eyes, focusing, amid the sound of assailants on a boat, on the sound of his mother assuring him that everything will be OK. The rest of what occurs in the book, a chronicle of his family’s story of immigration and life in America following their arrival in 1980, Pham learned only recently.

He didn’t know about the men, including his father, thrown overboard, the fires that were set on the boat, the fact that they were left with nothing: “Our boat was sinking — no water, no gas, no anything — and we just basically drifted onto the shores of Thailand.” He didn’t know that when they reached the refugee camp, there was no room for them, that his mom had to buy their way in and she would use what little remaining money they had to buy a food stall to make and sell bánh cuốn. Nor did he know his younger brother had become so sick at one point that he couldn’t walk.

My parents “were always so protective of us,” said Pham, now an artist in residency at 836M gallery. “They never really wanted to tell us anything that was bad or stressful.” During the pandemic, Pham finally began to really ask them about their story of immigration — a journey spurred by an uncertain postwar future because Pham’s grandfather had been a South Vietnamese general — and his parents finally began telling him.

Eventually, his parents turned the question back on Pham — what did he remember? “I realized that everything I remembered was tied to food,” Pham said. His earliest memory was on the boat, eating a rice ball mixed with fish that his mother had saved for him. “You can really taste the saltiness of that fish, and that rice was such a contrast that I still remember it,” he recalled. “I still taste it.”

Pham’s realization suddenly gave him a structure — the book’s chapters are titled after different foods — around which to finally record his family’s story, something he had for years wanted to center a comic around. These simple memories around dishes are also emblematic of a refugee story that, even amid its frank recollections of deep hardship, is defined also by warmth and comfort — moments offering reminders of home and new discoveries of small joys: hunting for crab in the camps, the exhilarating first taste of a potato chip.

“My memories of the refugee camp for me had also always been really joyful,” Pham said. “I just remember playing a lot with kids.” The biggest shift in his understanding of that past came when his parents indicated they, in fact, felt the same way.

“We lived in squalor, we lived in these shacks — were you sad? Was it suffering the whole time?” Pham remembers asking his father. “And my dad said, absolutely not, there was so much joy in that time. He said, it was great because you made it, and you found a whole group of people. And all the group of people, even though we had nothing, they all had hope.”

Longtime friend and collaborator Gene Luen Yang said Pham’s book offers a balanced view of humanity. “There’s an inherent hope that is able to overcome the trauma within the narrative,” said Yang, who wrote the acclaimed graphic novel “American Born Chinese.” “It’s a hope and sense of humor, too — he’s able to find what’s funny in really tragic situations.”

That hope and the group that forms around it provides the undercurrent to the book. From the camps to a small apartment complex full of Vietnamese refugees in San Jose, where Pham’s parents eventually work their way up from janitorial jobs to owning a small bakery, then a video store, there are people around, helping each other out.

In Pham’s conception, making it as an immigrant in America is defined not so much by the mythos of bootstrap individualism but by the community that makes survival, and eventually progress, possible. “I always seek out a community of people to be with,” Pham said, “and I’ve never really drawn the correlation of why I do that all the time until I listened to the story and I realized that I was basically raised by a community.”

He felt an unexpected jolt of this sense of connection years later when he obtained his American citizenship, a belated process, documented in the book, that he had put off for decades until the Trump era galvanized him. During the ceremony, surrounded by new citizens and strangers from different parts of the world, he found himself suddenly sobbing. It wasn’t even really the ceremony itself. “It was the people around me,” he said. “Again, a small community of people just sitting around and being so happy for each other, that we were all going through this together.”

Part of the emotion, he noted, likely was a version of what he felt when his parents finally told him their story. Suddenly, Pham said, “I saw them as heroes. My impression of where I was changed.”

More than anything else, the book is a tribute to them. “I realized that they were doing this whole thing when they were in their early 20s,” he said. “They took their kids on a boat to a new country that they didn’t know anything about, started a life, started businesses, learned English, learned skills, bought cars, all before the age of 26.”

他嘲笑自己,在那个时代,he was probably at his mom’s house, delivering pizzas. It’s a disorienting dissonance that often occurs between the first- and the second-generation immigrants. “The sacrifices they made at such a young age...,” Pham said, trailing off. To see such a gulf between those experiences, though, is also to say it was all worth it.

Brandon Yu is a freelance writer.