Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls is a lengthy exploration of how Hulls’s grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Chinese journalist before the communist party takeover. While she was a journalist, Sun Yi had a romance with a Swedish man, finding herself pregnant and abandoned, first refusing to leave China as the communist party battled the traditional ruling structures. After she’s harassed by spies and mentally degraded and tortured, and everyone is starving, Sun Yi takes her daughter and flees to Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong, she writes a bestselling memoir of her experience under communist rule. As her behavior becomes more erratic, what we would identify today as PTSD, Sun Yi is placed in one of the first psychiatric hospitals in Hong Kong. Eventually, she is brought to the U.S. after her daughter, Rose, moved there on a college visa. Hulls explains, “My grandmother’s body escaped China, but her mind did not, and her adult life was spent as little more than a shell to hold her ghosts.”

The author of Feeding Ghosts is Tessa Wells, Sun Yi’s granddaughter. Because Rose lost her mother to mental illness, she’s always been a highly emotional, over-bearing caregiver. After marrying a British man and having two children, Rose’s hyper-controlling care is shifted onto the author. Rose would call Hulls’s friends to warn their parents that Tessa had “behaviors” to look out for, for example. Hulls believes, “She only knew how to love something if it was broken. So to love me, I had to be broken. To be broken, she had to break me.” Feeding Ghosts isn’t just a memoir of Hulls’s life, but an exploration of how unaddressed trauma is passed through generations and the effects of communist China on its people.

It’s also an exploration of people who don’t fit neatly into categories; Hulls’s mother is half-Chinese and half-Swedish but raised in China and Hong Kong. Hulls is therefore 1/4 Chinese, 1/4 Swedish (from her mom) and half-British (her father). Because she wasn’t taught Chinese growing up and she looks “vaguely ethnic,” people treat her weirdly when they meet her family. Is she American? Is she Chinese? She never questions if she’s British; in fact, you might forget she has a father or brother, for this is not the story of men.

To me, the plot sounds familiar. However, Hulls’s writing style elevates the story, creating interesting sentences that capture both the thoughtful, introspective nature of the book without mincing words around the millions of lives lost in China during her grandmother’s life. At its heart, there is tremendous sacrifice in Feeding Ghosts, some of it misunderstood, some of it with negative consequences. The author’s mother, Rose, understands that her mother, Sun Yi, could not be a good mom. When Hulls and her mother sit for an interview to create Feeding Ghosts, Rose says, “[Sun Yi] always was a drowning woman, trying desperately to throw me on the shore so I would not drown with her.”

One of my favorite aspects of this graphic novel is the way in which Hulls breaks into the story as herself, the author, stopping readers to inform them that she wants to skip hard things but can’t. For instance, after she finishes school, she runs away — for about a decade — even living and working in Antarctica to escape her mother. Hulls acknowledges actions she took that hurt her mother, ways in which she put up a wall, ways in which Hulls and Rose disagree to this day.

Feeding Ghosts is an engaging, rewarding memoir that will teach you more about communist China, trauma through generations, and the power of giving voice to a story. It’s won multiple awards with good cause. The only faults I can find is I felt Hulls dragged out the “lessons” she learned by writing the memoir at the end. I kept turning the page expecting the story to be finished but finding another “what I learned” moment. Also, on a few pages it was hard to tell where my eye was supposed to go next, an important element of graphic novel design.

Books of Fall 🍂🎃🍵

• Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls
• The West Passage by Jared Pechaček
• Slewfoot by BROM
• The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
• Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• Just Desserts by G.A. McKevett
• Quest for the Unknown: Bizarre Phenomena by Reader’s Digest
• The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson
• Icebreaker by Hannah Grace
• A Life in Letters by Zora Neale Hurston
• Ask Elizabeth: Real Answers to Everything You Secretly Wanted to Ask about Love, Friends, Your Body — and Life in General by Elizabeth Berkley
• Homing by Sherrie Flick
• No Good Deed by Allison Brennan (#10)
• Bitter Thirst by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs #8)
• Deaf Eyes on Interpreting, edited by Thomas H. Holcomb and David H. Smith
• She Throws Herself Forward to Stop the Fall by Dave Newman
• Compassion, Michigan by Raymond Luczak
• Submerged by Hillel Levin
• Fat! So? by Marilyn Wann
• Syd Arthur by Ellen Frankel