“And Now This Story Is Ours”: Fairy Tale and Collage in Trung Le Nguyen’s The Magic Fish

Abstract:Trung Le Nguyen’s semiautobiographical fictional debut, The Magic Fish, has been praised for the complexity of its narrative structure, specifically its braiding together of Vietnamese and Western fairy tales; its engagement with the communication struggles of first- and second-generation immigrants, not least its portrayal of the bond between an immigrant mother and her naturalized American son; and the subtle portrayal of its thirteen-year-old protagonist’s struggle coming out to his immigrant family. In this essay, I will argue for the significance of Nguyen’s novel’s seamless fusion of content and form in his adaptation of fairy tale structure within the graphic novel format. Specifically, I will argue that Nguyen complicates the young adult coming-of-age formula and contests conventional discursive structures mapped onto the adolescent experience. The German and Vietnamese fairy tale narratives adapted and transformed within the text, combined with graphic novel form, create a structure capable of not merely contesting dominant discourses of cultural identity and sexuality, but projecting the possibility of queer futures.