asianamlitfans | A Review of Tessa Hulls' Feeding Ghosts (MCD, 2024)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As you might know, I’ve been adding a bunch more creative nonfiction to my reading lists. I decided to mix it up a little bit and shift toward a graphic memoir. In this case, I’m reviewing Tessa Hull’s truly amazing debut Feeding Ghosts (MCD, 2024). It’s been a while since I’ve read a graphic memoir like this one, and it ranks with the best of them: G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Belle Yang’s Forget Sorrow… these three are some that exist at the absolute pinnacle of the graphic memoir genre due to their textured explorations of transnational history and diasporic consciousness. Let’s let the marketing description assist us a bit further: “An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity. In her acclaimed graphic memoir debut, Tessa Hulls traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family. Tessa’s grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival—then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away. Feeding Ghosts is Tessa’s homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.”

This graphic memoir is truly an ambitious, sweeping, and thorough excavation of both personal and structural histories. I especially loved the way that Hulls works painstakingly to show how her mother’s and grandmother’s lives were intimately wound through the major upheavals of Chinese modern history, including the Japanese invasion, the rise of the KMT and the ensuing political fissures (The Great Leap Forward/ The Cultural Revolution), and the rise of Mao Zedong. Sun Yi gains a measure of success from her memoir, but the many ghosts that are pursuing her become too much, and she begins to exhibit signs of mental illness that will later overtake her life. Sun Yi’s inability to recover from her mental illness, or at least have some form of treatment for it, causes her daughter (Hulls’ mother) to become Sun Yi’s caretaker for the most part. The problem with this dynamic is that Hulls’ mother lives in a perpetual state of interdependence and heightened anxiety, which will later be projected onto Hulls herself. This predicament leads to a complicated home life when Hulls grows up in coastal California. Hulls’s memoir is obviously deeply researched: not only does Hulls travel to China multiple times to get a stronger sense of the spatial past that involves her mother and grandmother, but she also works to learn Mandarin (to communicate with her family). She also obviously must learn much about Chinese history. Scaffolding Hulls’ compelling personal story and political engagements are her brilliant illustrations. There is so much detail going on here, and Hulls really drives home the hungry ghosts tropes throughout the text. Returning images as well as the motif of something Hulls calls the “ghost twin” help clarify the impact of intergenerational trauma on succeeding generations. While Hulls’ mother has this “ghost twin” to reign in challenging emotional experiences, Hulls’ alter ego is none other than a cowboy, who lives free and roams far and wide around the world. I wonder if Hulls must have read Scott McCloud’s work because Hulls also consistently breaks the fourth wall to interrupt the narrative and speak directly to the reader. I loved these moments, as they provided a break from the difficult subject material but also generated an analytical auto-theoretical voice that put her perspective into context with her mother’s. The nuance of this approach is that Hulls reveals how her mother’s viewpoint on a given topic could be radically different than her own and that Hulls could not claim to have the sole perspective. Another really compelling aspect of this memoir is that it is really clear how collaborative it was: Hulls knows that her mother had to be integrated deeply into this writing process and that she couldn’t just share whatever she wanted. There is a level of restraint and care in this memoir that shows us that to tell a family history is also to dwell in a place where ethics and representation must intertwine. In this delicate balance mediating confession and reticence, Hulls’ deeply imagined, exquisitely crafted memoir truly and brilliantly soars. A home run with bases loaded.

Buy the Book Here