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#MAGIC FLOWERS LA HOW TO#
He has been trying to come out to his parents: “ I tried looking up how to tell them at the library. When Helen returns to the States, she can see that her son Tien has been struggling with his own difficulties. She learns the wisdom in the words of Tấm’s creaturely friends who whisper in the ears of the living that they must “ unbury the bones.”
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Helen learns that there is the possibility of life after death. They’ll change when they need to.” The stepmother learns that it is her own daughter who had died in Tấm’s place. It is at this point that her aunt intervenes with her own ending: “ They’re only stories. Jealous of Tấm’s newfound happiness, her stepmother kills the fish as well as Tấm. When Helen returns to Vietnam to attend her mother’s funeral, she tells her aunt, “ My happy ending never came.” Her aunt comforts her by telling her a Vietnamese version of the Cinderella story, “Tấm Cám.” In this telling, Tấm is tormented by her stepmother but befriends a magic fish who helps her find love. And, really, what is the point of tears among so much salt water?” and being caught in between feels like drowning. Helen’s life presents itself as an alternative ending for the fairy tale: “ The space between two shores is the ocean. At the end of “Allerleirauh,” the princess is happily wedded to a prince, while Helen learns that her mother had just died. Each night after Helen reads that story with Tien, she tries to call her own mother to check in on her health. The first story which Tien and his mother read is “Allerleirauh,” a variant of the Cinderella story in which Princess Alera becomes separated from her mother, the sea princess. With Magic Fish, Trung Le Nguyen joins not only a wave of graphic novelists who narrate the Vietnamese diaspora through comics (GB Tran, Thi Bui, Marcelino Truong, Matt Huynh, Clément Baloup) but also the many writers and artists who have latched onto the possibilities of nước (which means both “water” and “country” in Vietnamese) as a motif for portraying the Vietnamese refugee experience.