While that sentiment is likely to be somewhat familiar to any queer readers, Tién literally doesn’t have the words to communicate it to her (even after he asks for the librarian’s assistance in looking up the Vietnamese word for gay). Tién wants to come out to his mother, but he doesn’t know how. This is because of a phenomenon that Helen notes early on in the story.Ĭiting the various genres in which local theater performances have staged Hamlet, Helen observes that fairy tales recur around the globe wearing “different clothes.” As the story will go on to demonstrate, these echoed stories provide a viable avenue for connecting with one another, even when our differences have created what seems to be an impassable chasm. Each of these trio of stories is told by a different narrator: one by Tién, one by Helen’s aunt (who significantly still lives where Helen grew up in Vietnam), and one by Helen herself.Įach of these fairy tales is likely to be familiar to the reader (or at the very least, certain elements from each story will be). Over the course of the graphic novel, the reader is made privy to three of these stories, each one serving an important purpose in the broader narrative of The Magic Fish.
We swiftly learn that Tién and Helen seek to close this gap by building a bridge using stories. While words are meant to be a means of communion, Tién and his mother, Helen, find themselves on opposite sites of a divide: while Tién communicates mostly using English, Helen mostly speaks Vietnamese.
The evolution of words and storiesįrom the very first pages of The Magic Fish, language is foregrounded. If you think you’ve heard this one before, you haven’t, but you can be forgiven for the mistake: The Magic Fish is the kind of story that will repeatedly make you consider the familiar from a whole new perspective. He’s got a crush on one of his classmates, and he isn’t sure how to talk about that with either the object of his affection or his family. Set in 1998, The Magic Fish is the story of Tién, a boy who always seems to have his face stuck in a book.
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