Tessa Hulls opens the prologue to her graphic memoir, “Feeding Ghosts,” with the proclamation that she is looking “to find my way home.” In the accompanying image, the American-born cartoonist — in her early thirties on this, one of several roots trips she will take — sits facing her nearly 70-year-old Shanghai-born mother in a small railroad car traveling through China. The scene will bookend a stirring journey in which the author-artist locates “home” as a notion as fleeting and nondescript as the landscape unfolding beside the pair.
The search for home is an objective that will sound familiar — even cliché — to anyone who has chosen to dig into their family story after separation, whether by geography, language, culture, or all of these. But the narrative Hulls writes and draws is wholly original and often surprising.
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“Feeding Ghosts” tells the story of three generations — a grandmother, Sun Yi; her daughter, formally named Gok Yi Teem in China but known to her daughter by her westernized name, Rose; and her granddaughter, Tessa — in nine chapters drawn with meticulous black-and-white illustrations accompanied by judicious prose. It’s not just the mesmerizing story, particularly of the author’s maternal grandmother’s early life, that propels this work, but the vivid ways Hulls maps individual outcomes onto broader socio-political movements and contexts. The book is as much historiography as it is biography and autobiography.
“Why weren’t you interested in her when she was alive?”
Hulls’s mother asks this question soon after her mostly absent daughter, who has recently turned 30, decides to dig into the past. It’s only a few years after her grandmother, Sun Yi, died in the American home she shared for 35 years with Hulls’s family. Growing up, young Tessa knew her grandmother as the old woman who had lost her mind long ago. Sun Yi was almost wholly reliant on Rose (her daughter and Hulls’s mother), the only person with whom she could speak Chinese in their small Northern California town. No other Asian American families lived nearby.
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Hulls recalls her grandmother holed up most days in her bedroom, writing at her desk until late in the afternoon, when she would anxiously await Rose’s return from work. “Writing provided her sole sense of safety,” she explains. “A place where she could dictate the rules of her reality.”
Though the rest of the family united around keeping her grandmother writing, the granddaughter was a lone skeptic. As a result, Hulls distanced herself, eventually traveling to far-off parts of the world, including Antarctica and Ghana. Sun Yi’s death prompted her to reevaluate her desire for endless travel even as it inspired her to unearth the “ghosts” of her family’s past.
In turning to her grandmother’s story, there is plenty for the granddaughter to discover. Born in Suzhou in 1927, Sun Yi was a journalist in Shanghai who stayed during the Communist takeover. Eventually, she had a brief affair with a white Swiss diplomat, who vanished as quickly as he once appeared.
Hulls’s mother was born almost exactly one year after Chairman Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China, on Oct. 1, 1949, in Tiananmen Square. Against the backdrop of a series of tumultuous events, including a civil war, Japanese invasions, and famines and terror resulting from various communist crusades, Sun Yi and eventually Rose suffered near constant travails. They eventually escaped to Hong Kong — just five days after Rose turned 7, a few months shy of Sun Yi’s 31st birthday. But instead of leaving their troubles behind, Sun Yi’s mental state soon collapsed. She would enter Hong Kong’s first mental institution, and her madness would accompany her for the remainder of her life.
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Hulls learns details of her grandmother’s story through conversations with her mother as well as trips to China, where she speaks to people who knew her family and visits important landmarks. Incredibly, she also commissions an English translation of a memoir her grandmother published, titled “Eight Years in Red Shanghai: Love, Starvation, Persecution.” Written over three months in 1958 and published by a Taiwanese press, the book covered the years between 1949 and 1957. The bestseller was banned in China — just as, Hulls writes, the memoir she, the granddaughter, is composing will inevitably be banned there, too.
Throughout, tethering historical events to her grandmother’s and mother’s stories helps Hulls find continuity; the incongruous, often strained relationships within her family are finally given a framework. “The only way I can process Sun Yi’s mental collapse is to think of it as part of the larger whole of what was happening in China.” She points to moments in her grandmother’s memoir when she describes the torments she suffered as a counterrevolutionary, brutalities including repeated interrogations as well as near constant surveillance and intrusions. “My grandmother and Mao’s China both lost their tether to reality like Russian nesting dolls,” she observes at one pivotal moment.
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In the end, Hulls is startled by the realization that her grandmother’s maladies had “begun with something real,” a new comprehension that “changed everything for me.”
Making such connections ultimately allows her to better understand her own relationship with her mother, and her sense of herself as never easily identifying — neither as entirely Chinese nor as entirely American. In facing these ghosts from her family’s past, in letting them speak on the page, she comes to accept as perpetual her ambivalent sense of belonging and home. It’s a recognition that, ironically, allows her to finally feel ready to put down roots.
FEEDING GHOSTS: A Graphic Memoir
By Tessa Hulls
MCD, 400 pp., $40
Tahneer Oksman is a writer, teacher, and scholar specializing in memoir as well as graphic novels and comics. She lives in Brooklyn.