The Old Man and the Magic Fish Updated
The Old Man and the Magic Fish
What makes a hero? Information technology's a question that is frequently at the forefront of comics culture, dominated as it is past superhero stories. Just The Magic Fish, the debut graphic novel from author/creative person Trung Le Nguyen out this week from Random House Graphic, focuses on a dissimilar kind of valor: The everyday heroism of family members trying their best to intendance for and empathize each other beyond cultural differences.
The protagonist of The Magic Fish is Tiến, a young Vietnamese-American boy who is simply coming to terms with his homosexuality and struggling to effigy out how to communicate the truth about himself to his immigrant parents who don't speak much English. He and his mother, Hiền, find that the best way to communicate with each other is to read fairy tales together. Despite being archetypal stories in the vein of Cinderella or The Picayune Mermaid, these fairy tales resonate strongly both with Hiền's immigrant by and Tiến'southward hormonal present. Nguyen beautifully employs the three primary colors to continue these stories direct: Blue for the fairy-tale segments, yellowish for Hiền'south memories, and scarlet for Tiến's current experiences.
EW spoke with Nguyen this summer virtually The Magic Fish and the dear and heroism that it depicts. Check out that interview below, along with colorful excerpts from the volume.
Credit: Trung Le Nguyen for Random House Graphic
Credit: Trung Le Nguyen for Random House Graphic
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did y'all choose which three fairy tales to employ in this book?
TRUNG LE NGUYEN: At that place are three fairy tales in the story. The first ii are Cinderella stories, and then the last one is The Little Mermaid. Since fairy tales exist in a lot of dissimilar cultures with the same archetypes over and over, I thought that it would be really easy to play effectually with all of those details to conform the needs of the framing story. The first two were chosen so that I could highlight the differences in the imaginations between the female parent character and the son character. Tiến and Hiền accept very different visual imaginations and they grew upwards in very different places. They have unlike visual priorities and they accept different desires and wants. One wants validation in terms of like, 'I desire to be a part of this civilisation that I'm living in, but I don't feel like I have full access to it because my parents don't understand it.' The other one wants to work through her guilt in not existence absolutely everything that she could be to her kid. She doesn't know what she doesn't know. It'due south to highlight the fact that they are going through similar journeys, just they just come from it from different angles.
What is the role of h2o in this book? One of the fairy-tale characters is an ocean princess, and Hiền obviously had to cross the sea to get in to America in the beginning place.
I ever regard the sea as sort of a liminal space. It's that large affair in between land masses and it'southward a thing that kind of separates cultures. Whenever water shows upwardly, there's always a trivial bit of angst, similar 'here's this large, beautiful, deep thing that likewise happens to be this incredible barrier between united states of america.' The ocean always seems to pop up in my stories whenever there is this sense of longing and missing someone and feeling like you lot're missing a part of a person, even though they're right in front of y'all.
Credit: Trung Le Nguyen for Random House Graphic
You lot sometimes hear this pervasive conventionalities, especially from the entertainment industry, that boys only like stories with male person characters because that'southward all they can relate to, and by extension, girls only like stories with princesses or female characters. Obviously, that's not the case, specially in The Magic Fish. What were you lot exploring with the way that Tiến relates to the princesses in these stories?
Often at that place's the sentiment in classroom spaces where a lot of the protagonists for the stories that are chosen past the school district are usually cis white men. The thinking is girls develop faster than boys, and and then they're going to be able to relate to any character and they're going to exercise empathy in a manner that is a little bit more than proactive than boys. We need to give boys a little flake more fourth dimension before they can get-go exercising their empathy. I find that to be so strange because I feel like y'all want to be able to give boys the same opportunities to understand with people and characters that are different from them. That goes for people and characters from all unlike backgrounds. Why don't we tell more stories and permit all of our students and all of our readers to practice empathy and to latch onto stories that don't interface with their day-to-day being in a perfect manner?
I think about the way that princess stories occupy a particular place in the pop imagination, particularly in the United States. It's this place of frivolity, it'southward this idea of specialness without actually having to take responsibilities, and the characters lack a certain amount of agency. I call up that in terms of creating a story that's really relatable, a lot of younger readers are kind of out of place in their lives. They don't accept a lot of control over exactly how they go nearly taking the reins in their own life, they don't have full agency over all of the decisions that they desire to make in their life. Information technology's an feel that I really do detect to exist universal.
Credit: Trung Le Nguyen for Random House Graphic
Credit: Trung Le Nguyen for Random Firm Graphic
What were you exploring with translation in this story? Both the literal linguistic barriers and the larger cultural translations that make these fairy tales legible both to Tiến and his female parent?
The affair that I actually wanted to explore specifically with the language barriers is the notion of parents and children who are trying really difficult, but they just don't know what they don't know. I grew upward reading a lot of immigrant stories that were about the difficulty of parents coming around and agreement their children and supporting their children who grew upwardly in a different culture. A parallel to that is that when I was a kid I read coming out stories when I was trying to figure out how to tell my parents that I was queer. I read a lot of coming out stories, and they're always paired with trauma. There'south always sort of a 'first principles' disharmonize between the protagonist who is queer and their parents who are straight and they don't understand, or they're homophobic or transphobic, and they don't really know how to support their child. It's always this kind of fraught thing. I think it's important to have those stories out there.
The specific way that I wanted to tell my story was kind of based off of my parents who really did their best, simply we don't have enough of a common language to discuss the nuances of queerness and the language to discuss queerness is evolving every day, all the fourth dimension. How exercise yous support someone without feeling the pressure to continue up with the language all the fourth dimension, or what are the expectations that yous can have for how to care for someone when you don't know all of the correct words? The story is about finding a infinite of empathy and compassion for immigrant parents who don't accept the full cultural contexts to give their children everything that they want and wait from the childhoods that they can observe all around them. Information technology besides comes from a place of wanting to tell a coming out story where the queerness is non the source of the conflict. It's more that there is a communication barrier between people who genuinely dearest and support each other. I desire younger readers to understand that it is reasonable for them to await their parents to protect them no matter who or what they are. If they don't get that from their parents, that it's okay for them to feel insufficient, considering that's really non fair for them.
What do y'all think is interesting or rewarding most the depictions of heroism in fairy tales versus the style information technology's depicted in, say, superhero civilization?
I think it's the scope. It's 1 of those things where I have to describe a line between the things that I like to swallow and the things that I similar to make. I dearest to read superhero comics. I'm a actually big fan, but if I sit down and call back about drawing a fight sequence, and cartoon all those cars and explosions and buildings, I get wearied. It'due south just something that's not within my professional toolbox, but I practise love to consume those stories. Nonetheless, with fairy tales, I think the thing that I beloved the most is that the conflicts are oft petty and small-scale, non large and flatulent. Heroism looks dissimilar. Heroism looks like the character who is consistently kind and helps a lot of other characters along the mode. They all come back at the finish and rally around the character that was kind to them in a greater conflict. It'south an accessible sense of heroism. It's not a fantasy of ability. It's more than of a fantasy of growth.
I think The Magic Fish is especially interesting in the context of diverse cultural discourses we've been having for a couple of years, specifically the issue of various representation of characters. This flares up a lot around Disney movies in particular. While Disney has then far not really relented to describe major characters in their fairy-tale movies as outwardly gay, there are implications and things that fans tin can take from certain ones. That'due south what I love so much near The Magic Fish and what the mom discovers over the form of it. As her aunt keeps telling her in Vietnam, these stories really aren't unchangeable stone tablets or whatever. While staying true to them, you lot can change them and adjust them to fit your state of affairs and the kind of person y'all are, which she finally does by the end.
Yeah. I mean, I love Disney quite a lot, and I spend a lot of fourth dimension thinking about the way that it has affected how we think about princesses and female protagonists inside the popular imagination. The reason why I chose The Trivial Mermaid instead of another Cinderella story is because I did a lot of reading on the production of The Piffling Mermaid at Disney and kind of realized, okay, that story was changed to suit the needs of the shareholders of Disney and like all of the people who really needed the story to brand coin. If they tin change the story from Hans Christian Anderson'south story to suit the needs of any it is that they experience beholden to, then why tin't we also tell the story a different mode?
And so, I did a trivial bit more digging on the story and it's actually quite old. The Hans Christian Anderson version isn't fifty-fifty the oldest one. It'southward the 1 that nosotros all happen to know, only it was written in the 1830s. Then I realized equally I kept reading that it was supposed to be kind of a queer dear letter that Anderson had written to a friend of his who was a straight human being who got married to a woman who was likewise a friend of theirs. The Picayune Mermaid is about queer longing. Information technology's always been almost queer longing. Taking that story and reclaiming the queerness in information technology, outside of the space and time in which it was created where queerness wasn't discussed in the language that we accept at present, it felt like such a perfect opportunity to tackle in this infinite where the characters also don't take the acceptable language to hash out queerness. It'southward sort of like a coming full circle on that story.
Credit: Trung Le Nguyen for Random House Graphic
Credit: Trung Le Nguyen for Random Business firm Graphic
The Old Man and the Magic Fish
Posted by: christianolly1976.blogspot.com
0 Response to "The Old Man and the Magic Fish Updated"
Post a Comment