Feeding Ghosts

October 1, 2023

In the graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts, author/illustrator Hulls surveys three generations of women, starting with her Chinese grandmother, a Shanghai-based journalist who fled the 1949 Communist takeover for Hong Kong with her daughter, and ending with her own flight from family and subsequent return to understand how it has shaped her (75,000-copy first printing). Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 5, 2024
Hulls’s epic, elegantly etched graphic memoir debut tangles with trauma’s long tentacles as she follows three generations of her family from Mao’s China to Hong Kong in the 1960s and eventually to contemporary Northern California. Sun Yi, Tessa’s maternal grandmother, is a Chinese journalist at a Nationalist-leaning news outlet. After years of harassment and a forced written confession, she flees the mainland with her daughter, Rose, in 1957. In Hong Kong, Sun Yi publishes a (not quite factual) memoir about her abuse at the hands of the communist party that becomes “an overnight sensation.” But trauma takes its toll, and Sun Yi spends the rest of her life in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Rose grows up as a lonely boarding school child, immigrates to Minnesota as a college student in 1970, and eventually brings her mother to the U.S. Tessa witnesses their codependency and wants none of it. As a young woman, she sees herself as a “cowboy” (“Home became everywhere except where I was from”), and takes seasonal gigs (mostly as a cook) from Antarctica to Ghana. Eventually she feels the call of her family’s “hungry ghosts” and embarks on a trip to China and Hong Kong (“the only place that truly scared me”) with her mother, where “the act of returning to our family’s first point of rupture stitched us together into the fabric of a greater whole.” The shadowy, close-hatched drawings detail the landmarks of Sun Yi’s past and render expressionistic portraits of emotional truths, filling panels with maze-like layouts reminiscent of David B. The result is a revelatory work as layered as the history it explores. Agent: Anjali Singh, Ayesha Pande Literary.

February 1, 2024
A graphic novelist contends with her maternal family's complicated history. When Hulls was growing up, her grandmother was a constant but ill-defined presence "who shuffled around our house in gray Costco sweatpants." The author knew only three things about her mother's mother, Sun Yi: She was from China, she had once been a journalist and had written a bestselling memoir, and "long ago, something happened and she lost her mind." In her astonishing first book, Hulls sets out to discover not only what happened to her grandmother and how those events shaped her mother's upbringing, but how all of the above informed her own relationship with her mother and the world around her. She discovered that after years of harassment by the newly empowered Communist party, Sun Yi had fled to Hong Kong with her young daughter--the illegitimate child of a Swiss diplomat--in tow. There she enrolled her daughter in a prestigious school, wrote her memoir, and suffered a breakdown from which she would never fully recover. Hulls relates all this material in pages as meticulously researched as they are lushly drawn. She analyzes not only the cultural and historical context of her grandmother's and mother's lives, but also her own motivations, assumptions, and failures to truly understand and empathize with that maternal line. In her willingness to examine each troubling detail, the author is painstakingly thorough and relentlessly honest. "Sometimes I feel so angry at Sun Yi and how her damage stacked the deck against my mom," Hulls writes. "But I also see flickers of something much harder to stomach, where I use her as an easy target because I don't know how to feel the anger toward my mom." From start to finish, this book is a revelation. A work that glimmers with insight, acumen, and an unwillingness to settle for simple answers.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from February 1, 2024
Artist/writer/adventurer Hulls presents her debut graphic memoir in 400 dense, blackand-white pages that explore (and expose) mental illness, dysfunctional bonds, inherited trauma, and cultural disconnects across three generations. She "tells [her] story the only way it can be told: as part of an entwined trinity in which [her] mom, [her] grandma, and [she] blur together against a backdrop of Chinese history and diaspora." She begins with "three paltry grandmother facts": "China, writer, crazy." Sun Yi, the 90-pound specter of Hulls' childhood, was a daring journalist who escaped newly communist China with her mixed-race daughter, Rose (Hulls' mother) to land in Hong Kong, where she became a famous author before she "lost her mind." Rose--and Sun Yi, a few years later--immigrated to the U.S., where Rose became Sun Yi's caregiver for the rest of her life; their dysfunctional relationship manifested in traumatic complications into the next generation. Hulls copes by becoming "a cowboy of the mind," constantly running away from her "family's darkness." Sun Yi's death eventually calls Hulls home. "My grandmother was thirty when she wrote her memoir and saw her mind shatter. And I was thirty when I began piecing those fragments back together in the pages of this book." Almost 10 years later, audiences are invited to "enter this story"--detailed, vulnerable, harrowing--and bear witness to Hulls "releasing [her ghosts] into the light."

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.