A lovely mother-and-son story, about generational trauma, language and communication - through the only universal language besides mathematics: fairy tales.
Though unlike maths, fairy tales and stories are for everyone. They have worldwide appeal. They can last and endure for all time; they can entertain and be enjoyed by families throughout anything and every era. Most importantly, they can be changed with the times when it's necessary. Breaking traditions, altering outcomes and how the happily ever after turns out - all great when it's done for selfless reasons. Reasons like trying, attempting, to understand children and what they really need nowadays. To make a better life for them, with families that love and support them.To make a better world.
'The Magic Fish' is set in the nineties in the US. It is about the duel lives of twelve-year-old Tiến, and his Vietnamese immigrant mother Helen (plus his Vietnamese immigrant father), from the Vietnam War. To understand each other better, for Helen to improve her English and Tiến his Vietnamese, they have story times together, through library fairy tale books.
A huge problem is that Tiến doesn't know how to tell a secret to his parents in Vietnamese, and none of the storybooks he reads show any way for him to communicate it - his coming out. Nothing around him helps him to find the right words to express his true self to his beloved parents (his close friend at school, Claire, knows, and his other close friend and crush, Julien, may know as well). Worse, it seems to never be the right time to tell them: Helen, a young woman caught between two worlds in an ocean she's on the verge of drowning in, has a family back in Vietnam who she hasn't seen in years but stays in contact with, and when she finally revisits, with or without her son Tiến, it may be too late to make any amends. Helen may be struggling and suffering enough...
But maybe fairy tales - mainly ones from Vietnam - can help bring the family closer together, make them understand each other more. With a few changes here and there.
Sometimes mothers can be the real fairy godmothers...
The fairy tales told in 'The Magic Fish', in parallel with the lives of Tiến and Helen, are the original, darker versions of 'Cinderella' (two retellings, one mixed with 'Tattercoats' or 'Catskin') and 'The Little Mermaid'. The dresses drawn on each of the intrepid heroines in those stories are absolutely gorgeous and stunning. The author, Trung Le Nguyen, explains the reasoning for his artistic choices behind the period piece costumes, as well as other aspects in his art, in the comic's afterword, so I won't repeat his words here. He lays it all out better and smarter than I could.
And while the artwork is amazing, something negative I feel I have to point out is that often, Helen is drawn looking far too young. I was almost put out at the beginning when I realised she is not, in fact, Tiến's older sister, nor his school friend. They look the same age in most panels! Perhaps this was done purposefully, to highlight how young and inexperienced Helen truly is, in spite of her being in her thirties and what she went through during the conflicts in Vietnam. This is commented on, in a moment when Helen is on the phone to her Vietnamese relatives, telling them that Tiến looks a lot like her. The two are, in a way, similar, and not just in their shared love of fairy tales; protagonists who are two sides of the same coin.
Helen is a mother, but also a woman losing her roots and her place in the world, caught between what she knew in her old life and what she has to do to readjust in her new life. She wishes to progress, to learn, for her son's sake, without forgetting her country of birth, her childhood home. If she could survive and escape a war-torn country - for love - then she can adapt to any setback in her new existence - again, for love. And again, for her son's sake, and her own.
Only, Tiến's father, who went through the exact same hardships, still looks like an adult, so...
Tiến himself is a very passive main character, as well. However, he is very emotional and sensitive, and the reader readily understands his motives and passivity, given his circumstances.
I also love how supportive his friends are. It's the older, out-of-touch generation, the adults, who are the horrible, bigoted people.
Except, maybe, for Tiến's parents. Tiến is a wonderful, bespectacled, book-loving little gay boy, unfortunately closeted. But I think that, because of her brilliant development, of how her duality and grief are handled, and her uncertainty with herself and how her life turned out despite it being filled with unconditional love, Helen is my favourite character in the whole tale.
'The Magic Fish' is an original, unique, magical graphic novel. So much work went into making it as complex yet heartwarmingly simple as it is. It stays with you, long after you finish it, and it never forgets what the heart of the story is meant to be, beyond the "fairy tales are not real life" theme: the mother-and-son relationship. The mother-and-son multi-layered communication is a story that has almost never been told before, and it is beautiful. A patchwork jacket (Helen works as a tailor), fish, birds and peaches are other metaphors in this exquisite dream, containing stories within stories.
This is what comics - all stories - are supposed to do: Transcend. Transform. Keep changing. Keep evolving, to teach empathy and compassion. Keep loving - the craft, and the chaotic, magnificent and awe-inspiring diversity and lives of humanity.
Final Score: 4/5
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