Fairytales are a recurring motif throughout The Magic Fish. Three are told in full. For Tiền and Hiền, they are a way of communicating and escaping their day-to-day lives. Each fairytale is illustrated in blue, in contrast with the yellow used to portray the past and the light red for the present. Fairytales remind Hiền of her mother; she tells Tiền at the start of the novel that “[y]our bà ngoại used to tell me all kinds of old ghost stories and fairytales when I was a little girl. She and her sister” (6). She had hoped her mother would one day recount those same stories to Tiền so that he could understand her better and where she came from, especially since she feels so separate from him. To her, the differences between their childhoods are very stark. While she had hoped for a better life for Tiền, she feels adrift from both her home country and her son.

Nguyen touches on the changing nature of fairytales. At the start of the novel, the first fairytale is a Cinderella story. While Hiền lets Tiền know that there is a Vietnamese version of the story, she can’t remember it. When Hiền travels to Vietnam for her mother’s funeral, her aunt recounts the story.