Feeding Ghosts

Feeding Ghosts opens in 2016 with author Tessa Hulls and her mother traveling through China, enduring the usual awkwardness and hostilities that arise on a family vacation. But this isn’t exactly a vacation; Hulls is trying to find her ancestral roots whilst addressing the matrilineal trauma that forced her grandmother to flee to Hong Kong, and her mother to America.

Over 380 pages, Hulls unpicks the strands of these three lives, weaving a fascinating story of multicultural identity and family history. Feeding Ghosts is a beautifully told story that deserves a place on bookshelves alongside Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Nora Krug‘s Belonging. Hulls has delivered a major work with this memoir and an absolute treasure of a comic book.

Hulls takes the role of narrator on this journey, telling us early on that her grandmother, Sun Yi, led an interesting but tragic life. Born on the cusp of China’s Civil War, Sun Yi would witness the atrocities of the second Sino-Japanese War and later became a journalist working in Shanghai. After bearing an illegitimate child—Tessa’s mom—to a Swiss diplomat, Sun Yi encountered persecution from the Communist Party and fled to Hong Kong.

After writing a bestselling memoir about her libertine adventures, Sun Yi developed a long-term mental illness, leaving her young daughter to be raised in an Eurasian orphanage-turned boarding school. The family myth thus established, Hulls embarks on a deep dive into the murky waters of her past, trying to separate fact from embellishment and examining her own identity within this multi-layered story.

As anyone who’s had to overcome trauma might recognize, healing is rarely a linear process. Themes, images and details come up time and again until the healing cycle begins to generate, allowing traumatic memories carried in the nervous system to be freed. Feeding Ghosts conveys this nonlinear process; it is densely rich in imagery and symbolism, as if Hulls let her subconscious guide her pen. The pages teem with black, inky water - a representation of the feminine, of emotion and life, as well as the literal waters separating Tessa’s Chinese and American identity.

The physical world that she represents here is visually connected by so many stairwells, ladders, plants and flowers, roots, threads and meals. As the story circles closer and closer to its emotional truth, the drawings keep returning us to firm ground before the inky waters carry us away again.  The book is a rich visual experience, adding layers of meaning to a story brimming with life.

Something I identified deeply with in this story is how Tessa depicts the way trauma can divide a person from the inside. We cut ourselves off from pain as means of survival, but this dissociation also cuts us off from joy and connection with others. Tessa shows this with Sun Yi, attempting to connect the mentally ill grandmother she knew to the unreliable narrator in Sun Yi's memoir. The split is there in her mother, too, who assumes the identity of a ‘ghost twin,’ a dissociated state where bad memories can no longer touch her. Tessa is not immune from this splitting off within herself either, adopting a cowboy attitude - a solitary, untouchable adventurer who leaves town when the heat’s turned up.

Even as she tries to dismantle this cowboy persona and reclaim her history, her solitude persists. As she excavates this trauma, she goes it alone by learning from books, rather than engaging with a friendly therapist to hold her hand or guide her. Later in the story, Hulls reveals why she’s doing this difficult work alone—no spoilers here—but it was a devastating reveal for me as a reader (and as a cartoonist who swears by therapy).

So, let’s talk about that. A theory from Internal Family Systems therapy (and found in other fields that consider epigenetics) is that we carry legacy burdens. That is, the trauma we inherit from our ancestors is on a repeat cycle through generations until we consciously interrupt it and begin to heal. It’s a theory that plays out in Tessa’s work. We see moments from history such as Mao’s 1958 campaign against pests, where sparrows were driven from the skies above towns and villages, denied roost until they died of exhaustion and fear. Hulls likens her grandmother to those persecuted sparrows, and later the symbolism will be evoked again in a more recent example.

Tessa writes about her former boyfriend, a neuroscientist who performed brain surgery on finches to disrupt their ability to learn songs. Tessa compares these voiceless finches to her mother, even as the cage of matrimony is threatening to fall on Tessa herself. When Tessa leaves the relationship, the cowboy persona asserts itself yet again and she’s once more alone, in the wilderness. I’m really in awe of Hulls’ skill as a cartoonist at these moments. She layers on meaning and metaphor, folding you back into the story.

Bessel van der Kolk, the psychotherapist made famous for his seminal 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score, wrote: “We are a hopeful species. Working with trauma is as much as about remembering how we survived as it is about what is broken.” Feeding Ghosts is a hopeful book. It’s a sweeping story of how a family wounded by history nonetheless survived and continued to carry each other. Hulls shows how to find one’s way back to history, fueled by her own yearning for love and intimacy.

For her, I hope this book was a bridge to the meaning and repair she was seeking. For the reader, this is a remarkable and vivid gift that fully utilizes the comics medium as the perfect medium for this compelling story.

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