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\u201cFeeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir\u201d tells its story with powerful visual metaphors. (Photo courtesy of Tessa Hulls)<\/p>\nThis year\u2019s winner of the Washington State Book Award for Creative Nonfiction is a breathtaking achievement of memoir, art and Chinese history.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Growing up, Tessa Hulls knew three things about her grandma, Sun Yi: She was from China, she was a writer, she was crazy. Their home was defined by Sun Yi\u2019s fragile mental state and the toll it took on Tessa\u2019s mom. Alone in her room, Sun Yi scribbled disjointed memories and anxiously awaited the return of her daughter, the only person in her family who could read or speak Chinese.<\/p>\n
Tessa\u2019s mom believed that Sun Yi\u2019s madness and writerly temperament could be inherited, and feared that danger was lurking in the mind of her own creative daughter.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Alternately distant and emotionally suffocating, her mom\u2019s psychic wounds manifested in an unpredictable dual nature that Hulls calls the \u201cghost twin.\u201d For the first time, we see the imagery that Hulls uses throughout \u201cFeeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir\u201d to represent the trauma that haunts her family: spectral swirls that feel both delicate and frenetic crowd into the panels\u2019 negative space. <\/p>\n
\u201cFeeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir\u201d tells its story with powerful visual metaphors. (Photo courtesy of Tessa Hulls)<\/p>\n
To escape her mom\u2019s love\/anxiety, Tessa escapes into a nomadic life of art and seasonal work. But even cowboys can\u2019t drift forever, and Tessa\u2019s journey back to her mother begins with the question: \u201cWhat broke my family?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Starting with her grandma\u2019s memoir, she uncovers a story of intertwined insanities: Sun Yi\u2019s mental collapse, brought on by the insanity of life under Maoist regime. Hulls lets her grandmother speak for herself in this part of the story, using a typewriter font to denote words drawn from her memoir: \u201cEight Years in Red Shanghai: Love, Starvation, and Persecution.\u201d <\/p>\n
In 1949, Sun Yi worked as a journalist in Shanghai when the People\u2019s Liberation Army took the city. She resisted assignments to write propaganda and became a target of Mao\u2019s crackdown on \u201cideologically problematic people.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The line between her grandma\u2019s lifelong paranoia and the psychological torture she endured \u2014 constant surveillance, interrogation, being forced to rewrite the same confession over and over \u2014 is a straight one. But Sun Yi\u2019s story doesn\u2019t end with her memoir, and Tessa and her mom have origin stories of their own.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the nine years she spends researching, writing and illustrating this book, Hulls unearths a sweeping family saga contoured by the powers of war, colonialism and totalitarian government. Hulls\u2019 candid narration and evocative illustrations make a complex period of Chinese history feel immersive and accessible.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Tessa Hulls is an artist, writer and adventurer \u201cwhose restlessness has carried her to all seven continents.\u201d (Photo courtesy of Gritchelle Fallesgon)<\/p>\n
Hulls\u2019 etching-like illustrations of material objects and places \u2014 a single shoe, a coal-burning stove \u2014 keep us grounded in reality, but Hulls\u2019 true gift is for powerful visual metaphors. Most striking are the ghosts, wearing a myriad of forms that link her family history with China\u2019s descent into dictatorship. <\/p>\n
Phantom feathers represent the sparrows killed in Mao\u2019s 1958 eradication campaign, a man-made omen of famine. Turn the page, and petals from Mao\u2019s Hundred Flowers Campaign turn into the heads and limbs of executed dissenters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFeeding Ghosts\u201d is the second graphic novel to win a Pulitzer; \u201cMaus\u201d was the first. Like Art Spiegelman, Hulls didn\u2019t merely create a visual and literary masterpiece, but a masterclass in media literacy. At its heart, \u201cFeeding Ghosts\u201d is about the stories we tell ourselves to maintain a mythos. What do we feed hungry ghosts if not the lies we choose to believe? During a time when censorship and the sanitization of history are making a resurgence, \u201cFeeding Ghosts\u201d compels us to embrace our complexity.<\/p>\n