When a fairy tale helps coming out

Even today, coming out in your own family is not easy. But what happens when you finally find the courage to say yourself and you don’t have the words, in your native language, to tell your parents about it?

It seems incredible that today, with the explosion of acronyms and neologisms for gender identities and sexual orientations, there are languages ​​that only use periphrases or allusions to say love between people of the same sex. Yet, that’s exactly what happens in the semi-autobiographical graphic novel of a young illustrator, Trung Le Nguyenby title The Magic Fish. The Tales of the Magic Fish (Tunué). The author was born in a refugee camp and moved to the United States with his parents, where they learned English together through reading fairy tales. The novel tells the story of Tiến Phong, a second-generation Vietnamese American teenager, who helps his mother learn English through fairy tales as she struggles to express her feelings towards boys.

“I don’t know the words in Vietnamese to talk about it,” says the young protagonist, with a poignant tenderness and innocence. However, there are those who argue that today there is no need to define ourselves, that we are all people, that lgbtqia+ identities are useless and even counterproductive labels. What do you think?
“I would say it depends. Sometimes labels don’t matter, but others are very important. We cannot apply the same pattern to everyone. Personally, I don’t attach much importance to definitions. I’m a gay American-Vietnamese person, I’m comfortable using two different pronouns, and my experience with gender identity is very serene. But trans people, for example, have fought hard for recognition of their true selves. In cases like this a label has some relevance. It is something that varies from person to person, and even if it may require a greater effort, it is necessary to respect the individual relationship that each person has with the definitions that they feel are their own ».

How was his coming out in the family?
“My coming out was an ‘accident’, and yet it turned out to be very sweet indeed. I had decided that I would not come out before adulthood, because my parents are very Catholic. I didn’t know how they felt about it, but I still wanted to keep it to myself. My mother learned this when she found an essay I had written for homework. She asked me to tell her about it, so I confirmed it, and she was supportive. Neither of us knew what my father’s opinion was, and I didn’t want my mother to find out for herself. My younger brother, who was thirteen or fourteen at the time, already knew this, and he told me that he wanted to be there to support me when I told my father. Dad came home and saw me, my mom and my brother all in the same room, so he realized there was something important we wanted to tell him. He too, however, was immediately very understanding. His biggest concern was about my safety, as I attended a very conservative Catholic school, and he feared that I would be targeted by bullies. My family is really loving, I consider myself very lucky.”

What fairy tales inspired you and how did you reinterpret them?
“My parents used to read me story books that I chose from the library, I remember one of my favorites was Princess Furball by Charlotte Huck and Anita Lobel. This book is a version of Doghair (original title Allerleirauhndt), which I refer to in one of the fairy tales of The Magic Fish. Love you East of the Sun and West of the Moon (East of the sun and west of the moona Norwegian fairy tale, ndt), which derives from Love and Psyche. Fairy tales are re-interpreted often, and we can find new ways to appreciate them as we tell them again and again. In The Magic Fish I put together several fairy tales to get the western version of Cinderella. Tấm and Cam it is my imperfect collection of Vietnamese short stories as I remember them. The little Mermaid is told quite faithfully, at least until the last lines, when one of the narrators invents an alternative and special ending».

Part of the book draws on the underwater world: there is the myth of the mermaid, half woman and half fish, which in a sense could be a metaphor for being queer, as we would say today.
“Absolutely yes! Hans Christian Andersen wrote his version to express his restless romantic feelings for a friend. When I was little I read it as a story of immigration, as the siren gives up her voice and heads to a new world just to have the chance to be with the person she loves. I didn’t learn about a certain queer tinge in Andersen’s pages until I was growing up.”

But the sea is also an unknown world, for one of the protagonists, who loses his bearings and habits to look at everything with new eyes: could this also be a metaphor for being a migrant?
“The ocean is prominent in the stories and art related to the diaspora of the Vietnamese people. It is a literal and metaphorical distance between ourselves and our homeland. It represents the flow of the passage of time, and the distance that separates us from our past is great. It can be a very useful parallel, so it appears frequently.

He wrote that in novels “at worst we find immigration stories reduced to character tropes used, say, by the news for their disgruntled viewers.” What was he referring to?
«I was referring to the media when I wrote this, and I think they have limited space and time, in fact there is not enough space in a single article or story to capture all the nuances of each collective of people. But there are still ways to find stories and art produced by immigrants. It is here that we can get in touch with the specifics of their humanity».

the Magic Fish Finally, he also tells us about the discovery of love between women. Without spoilers, what else did this story want to suggest?
“Sometimes I think straight people like to distance themselves from queer attraction. Some cisgender men find the idea of ​​two women together acceptable, but may despise a pair of men. It always seemed strange to me, and I wanted a character in the story to object to that idea. He wants to express that he accepts the queerness of every person, even when it’s someone close to her, which I always appreciate in straight people. She suggests that she is empathetic, as well as showing a willingness to imagine what such love would be like for herself, even though she is not queer.”

Thanks to Aurora Galbero for the translation