(W) Tessa Hulls (A) Tessa Hulls
In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women in her family: 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 years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter, Rose. 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, traveling to the farthest corners of the globe. At age thirty, it started to feel less like freedom and more like running away, so Tessa returned home to face the history that shaped her family. 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.