Tessa Hulls Confronts Family History in 'Feeding Ghosts'
Seattle author and artist Tessa Hulls was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in memoir or autobiography for "Feeding Ghosts," her debut graphic memoir tracing three generations of women in her family against the backdrop of 20th-century Chinese history. To celebrate, The Emerald is republishing Jas Keimig's 2024 interview with Hulls, where she spoke about the emotional weight of the project, her research process, and what it means to confront inherited trauma through art.
In Tessa Hulls' graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts, time, memory, and truth all twist, bend, and cross paths with one another as she tells the story of her grandmother, her mother, and herself over the past 100 years. During the 2020 protests and formation of CHOP, Hulls' informational comics went viral for their clarity and directness. That same keen, observational eye and ability to cut right to the heart of her subject is on full display in her 10-years-in-the-making Feeding Ghosts, which is a blistering, emotional, and dense read on family.
The threads in this story are many. There is Hulls' grandmother, Sun Yi, a dissident Shanghai journalist who fled mainland China for Hong Kong during the Communist revolution, who wrote a best-selling (and, until recently, untranslated) memoir about her scandalous life and then descended into the thick of mental illness until her death. There is Hulls' half-white mother, Rose, who was educated at Hong Kong's top school, immigrated to America, and served as Sun Yi's caretaker throughout her entire life. And finally, there's Tessa, a self-described cowboy who at first traveled far and away from her emotions and controlling mother, but is now confronting the generations of trauma winding from her grandmother to her mother to herself.
Feeding Ghosts operates on several levels — it's at once a history book, a memoir, and a commentary on memoir-making itself. As she unwinds the stories of Sun Yi and her mom, different versions of the truth emerge and leave you wondering how true are the histories we tell each other about our families.
Ahead of the book's March 5 publishing date and Hulls' Town Hall appearance, the Emerald jumped on the phone to chat with Hulls about the book, how to navigate the truth, and why Hulls isn't excited for Feeding Ghosts to be out there in the world.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
In your book, you mentioned that you started making comics while working as a chef in Antarctica. Did you know this memoir was going to take a graphic novel form? Or did it kind of end up there?
I knew immediately that I was gonna have to do it as a graphic novel for a couple of different reasons. I think the main one was that if I had done this just as a written book, it would have ended up so history-heavy it would have been relegated to an academic or a niche sphere. Because there would be no way to convey that much information without boring the hell out of people and having their eyes gloss over. Since so much of the book is about not being able to trust a narrative and there being multiple competing realities, I knew I had to make it as a graphic novel, because that was the only way I could bring the viewer into this meta point about stories that are in conflict. And to really show how that's playing out on the page, where often the visuals and the words will contradict each other in a way that's incredibly intentional.
I also knew that doing it as a graphic novel would basically allow me to dance through time in a way that I couldn't do if I had just written it. So by having the device of myself as the narrator and being in my studio, it gave me the ability to literally interject and really guide the reader through how they're experiencing the story. I did know from the jump that it was gonna be a graphic novel, and I knew that meant I was gonna have to learn a completely different skill set, because I very much did not know how to draw comics going into it. Along the way, I also had to become a historian and a journalist. So I think that's part of why I'm just so burned out from it, is that the life that I've ended up leading is something that I created solely to make this book. And I think I probably would have taken a really different trajectory if it hadn't been for that. So it's an interesting case study in what happens when you have one project and you have to have a series of skills that require you to completely change your life in order to pull it off. I'm not sure I would recommend it.
You're basically charting decades of immense development in Chinese history. How did you sort through all of that? What were you able to take away about that process?
I feel perhaps an overly compulsive due diligence to try and get it right, especially because I'm working with history that I haven't experienced firsthand. And, you know, just the fact that the Communist Party is so militant in controlling the flow of information and essentially dictating reality. Once you start really reading primary sources and reading the wide web of writing about this time, you start to realize, like, oh fuck, you can't actually talk about what happened unless you basically educate yourself about it from this 360-degree vantage point. So I definitely read over 100 books just learning the history for this. Because once you start to read enough things from a similar time period, you start to see the biases and the perspectives of the way that these historical incidents are refracted through different voices. I felt like I needed to read enough to get as close as I could to knowing what it was like to live through it in real time while also knowing that there were these massive government-disinformation and altered-reality campaigns happening within archives.
Throughout Feeding Ghosts, there's so much discussion of duality and binaries — whether you're talking about feeling versus unfeeling, immigrant versus second generation, Chinese versus American. How did you settle on a "truth" amid all of that context of your own perspective versus your mother's versus your grandmother's?
I think I really just tried to lay it out as a choose your own adventure narrative for the reader, where I don't think that there actually is a truth. The point that hopefully I made in the book is that truth is just something that we decide to believe, and it's never going to line up, there is no objectivity. I try to be as transparent about that as possible. So it is interesting to me now that advanced copies are out in the world enough to be getting some feedback. It's like a Rorschach test to see what people decide is true out of this.
How did you also navigate telling the truth about your family experience versus having a protective wall that might come up when it comes to discussing really hard and unsavory things about what happens between your family members?
There's this line in Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? — that I'm gonna butcher because I haven't actually read it in a while — but it's something to the effect of, the artist's duty is to the story. I think that was a really important distinction where I felt my duty was to the story. I tried to be respectful and responsible and accurate in every way that I could. I did work with my mother closely on many aspects of this book, and I think that's part of the reason I tried so hard to put into the bones of the book this idea that we're all choosing our own truths. I'm not saying that any one perspective is right. Hopefully the fact that I hold compassion for all of these different viewpoints comes through. I tried to walk that line between explaining what happened and really showing that everyone in the book is a flawed but ultimately very understandable character. The decision to never actually name any of [my grandmother's] diagnoses was really deliberate.
A couple of weeks ago, you posted on Instagram and you were really candid and honest about the fact that this book launch isn't really a celebratory one. Could you expand on that feeling a bit and where you're at with it right now?
Honestly, I just think the process of working on something for this long was just so psychically devastating, and doing it during COVID as the world was falling apart, it did a number on my relationship with my creative process. I feel like I'm really trying to work my way back to the ability to feel any sense of curiosity or play or joy. I think I will get there. But for me, this book going out in the world is like having to go on tour to celebrate a horrific car accident that I'm still learning how to walk from. And it's not like I ever wanted to do this, it's that my family ghosts hijacked me and basically told me I had to. So for me, this book was very much a project of stereotypical immigrant kid duty where I was like, oh, fine, if I have to, I will. Yeah, so that's, that's kind of how I'm feeling about it.
I think it's clarified for me that my way of being an artist is wanting to be out in the world and engaging with and responding to what's happening — it's always been a really interactive and additive process. Sitting alone in a room drawing my crying mother through the depths of COVID was the opposite of that. So that's kind of where I'm at with it — I'm working on it.
Tessa Hulls' "Feeding Ghosts" comes out on March 5. She will be in conversation with Putsata Reang at Town Hall on March 6 and will make another appearance at Elliott Bay Books with Jane Wong and Michelle Pealoza on April 23.
This article is published under a Seattle Human Services Department grant, "Resilience Amidst Hate," in response to anti-Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander violence.
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