Pluralistic: Tessa Hulls's "Feeding Ghosts" (2 Jul 2025)

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Originally published at: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/02/filial-piety/



Today's links


The Farrar, Straus, Giroux cover for Tessa Hulls's 'Feeding Ghosts.'

Tessa Hulls's "Feeding Ghosts" (permalink)

Tessa Hulls's debut graphic novel is Feeding Ghosts, a stunning memoir that tells the story of three generations of her Chinese family. It was a decade in the making, and it is utterly, unmissably brilliant:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601652/feedingghosts/

Feeding Ghosts is about Hulls's quest to understand – and heal – her relationship with her mother, a half-Chinese, half-Swiss woman who escaped from China as a small child with her own mother, a journalist who had been targeted by Mao's police. Hulls's grandmother, Sun Yi, wrote a bestselling memoir about her experiences in post-revolutionary Shanghai that made her both famous and notorious, in part because of the salacious details of Sun Yi's affair with the Swiss diplomat who fathered Rose, Hulls's mother.

In Hong Kong, Sun Yi's mental health declines precipitously. Some combination of mental illness and trauma – both from the horrors of the Sino-Japanese War and the her torture at the hands of the Chinese police – sends her into a spiral of paranoid delusions. But Sun Yi has a community of people who feel an obligation to support her in Hong Kong, including one of her rich "boyfriends" – and Rose is sent away to a fancy, British-run girl's school dominated by expats where she acquires a cut-glass accent and learns to mix upper-class, colonial English gentry.

Hulls is born to Rose many years later, after Rose has emigrated to the USA, attended university, married twice – the second time to Rose's father, an Englishman – and moved her mother in with her. For Hulls, growing up in Rose's household as the only Asian kid in a small American town, is a series of torments. Her mentally ill grandmother lives in one bedroom, gripped by delusions, compulsively writing, fretting, begging with her few English words for Rose to come back. Rose, meanwhile, is a duty-stricken domestic saint who does all the cooking and cleaning, cares for her children and her husband, and looks after her totally isolated, profoundly disturbed mother.

Hulls grows up in the shadow of the intergenerational trauma – genocide, war crimes, colonialist discrimination, untreated mental illness, and everyday American racism – that haunts her family. Rose veers from doting to shouting, terrified that Hulls is sliding into the family's madness, unable to understand or grapple with Hulls's identity as a self-proclaimed "mixed-race" Eurasian person, born in America, unable to speak Chinese or to understand her Chinese identity.

All of this biography is interspersed through several time-hopping sections that recount the history of the Chinese revolution and the lives of Sun Yi and Rose, along with scenes from the decade that Hulls spent writing and drawing Feeding Ghosts, during which she and her mother travel to see their family in China, on a literal and figurative journey of reconciliation.

It sounds complex and confusing, but it's anything but. Each of intertwined narratives – revolutionary China, Rose's girlhood, Hulls's girlhood, the trips to contemporary China, Hulls's adulthood and Sun Yi's institutionalizations and long isolation – are high stakes, high-tension scenarios, beautifully told. Hulls hops from one tale to the next in ways that that draw out the subtle, imporant parallels between each situation, subtly amplifying the echoes across time and space.

In the final third of this long, large book, we get to the meat of Hulls's own story: her tempestuous relationship with her mother, her mother's immersion in a psychoanalytic cult, the sad demise of Sun Yi, and the wild flight of Hulls herself, in which she breaks off her stultifying engagement and teaches herself to be a bicycle mechanic and begins cycling all over the world, living on pennies and consummating her love of wild and empty spaces. At college, she becomes a cook through a weekly women's drunken pie-baking night, and somehow parlays that into a long session as a cook in Antarctica on McMurdo Station.

This final third acts as a kind of keystone to the many interwoven tales, as well as to the complex relationship between Hulls, her mother, and her own sense of self. Up until this point, the different threads of Hulls's family's story are subtle echoes of one another, motifs that repeat and vary. But in this final third, the reader – and Hulls – experience a profound psychological realization about how the three stories of these three generation of women, along with China's tumultuous history and the experience of an American immigrant all produced the person whose bold illustrations and sharp prose we've been immersed in for hundreds of pages. It's a wild moment.

Hulls's art style runs to dark, stylized inks, with horrors and ghosts puncturing individual panels' frames and wending through the page. It's a phantasmagorical experience.

Feeding Ghosts came out in March, and has gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize, only the second graphic novel in history to take the honor (the first was Maus, another memoir of intergenerational trauma, horrific war, and the American immigrant experience).

The prize is a big deal, obviously, and it's no coincidence that this kind of difficult illustrated memoir has won both graphic novel Pulitzers. Hulls joins the annals of world-altering comic-book memoirists, from Lynda Barry to Emil Ferris (My Favorite Thing is Monsters) to Art Spiegelman and Chester Brown. She has pulled of a magnificent feat, one that illuminates history, contemporary racial and gender politics, the immigrant experience, and the impossible problems of parents and children in the aftermath of unspeakable trauma.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

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#15yrsago Copyright best practices for communications scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20100628005458/http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-scholarly-research-communication

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#10yrsago BBC’s list of pages de-indexed through Europe’s “right to be forgotten” https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Finternet%2Fentries%2F1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379

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#5yrsago Female Furies https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#apokolips-now

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Uncanny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

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