Feeding Ghosts

Persepolis meets Crying in H Mart in this astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir of three generations of women, exploring love, grief, exile, identity, and forgiveness.

In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women: her grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself.

Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory in China. After fleeing to Hong Kong with her young daughter, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival—then promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution.

Growing up, Tessa watches her mother care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the weight of Sun Yi’s unexamined trauma and mental illness. Vowing to escape her mother’s smothering fear, Tessa leaves home and travels to the farthest, most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, her roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away, so she returns to face the history that shaped her family.

Extensively researched and gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Tessa’s homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of modern Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, Feeding Ghosts exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.

TESSA HULLS is an artist, a writer, and an adventurer. Her essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Adventure Journal, and her comics have been published in The Rumpus, City Arts, and Spark. She has been awarded grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, 4Culture, and the McMillen Foundation, and is the recipient of the Washington Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award. Feeding Ghosts is her first book.