Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir

Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir

4.47 out of 5 stars

4.47

Author:Tessa Hulls

Publisher:MCD

Published:2024-03-05

Page count:400

ISBN:9780374601652

Content Summary

An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity. In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women in her her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself. Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After eight years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter. Upon arrival, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, used the proceeds to put Rose in an elite boarding school―and promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution. Rose eventually came to the United States on a scholarship and brought Sun Yi to live with her. Tessa watched 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 left home and traveled to the farthest-flung corners of the globe (Antarctica). But at the age of thirty, it starts to feel less like freedom and more like running away, and she returns home to face the history that shaped her family. Extensively researched and gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghost s is Hulls’s homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of 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.

Author Introduction

Tessa Hulls is an artist/writer/adventurer who is equally likely to disappear into a research library or the wilderness. 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 The Margins. She has been awarded grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, 4Culture, and the Robert B McMillen Foundation, and received the Washington Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award. For the last almost-decade, she has focused on creating Feeding Ghosts, a graphic memoir that traces three generations of women in her family across a backdrop of Chinese history to explore the complicated ways that mothers and daughters both damage and save one another.

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