'Feeding Ghosts' is a graphic memoir grappling with generational trauma

NPR's Book of the Day

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Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2026

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

As 2025 comes to a close, we're revisiting interviews with this year's nominees and winners of some of the biggest prizes in literature. Tessa Hulls’ grandmother, Sun Yi, was a dissident journalist in Shanghai who faced intense political persecution during the Chinese Communist Revolution. In today’s episode, Hulls tells Here & Now’s Scott Tong that her grandmother’s trauma often cast a shadow over their family – one she decided to finally face in her new graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts. It’s a reexamining of Hulls’ matriarchal lineage, of Chinese history and of generational love and healing.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. When you undergo a project that involves
0:07.6	looking back into your family history, asking questions about who these people were that came
0:12.4	before you, you kind of have to be prepared to not like them, or at least come away with a more
0:18.0	ambivalent idea of them, right, unless you're only interested
0:21.0	in hagiography, which, you know, you do you. But if you are looking for truths, you'll probably
0:26.3	come across some unpleasant ones along the way. That's what happened to comics artist Tessa Hulse,
0:31.6	who's got a graphic memoir out called Feeding Ghosts, where she examines the impact of China's
0:36.7	cultural revolution on her family.
0:38.8	And in this interview with here and now Scott Tong, she talks about certain calculated
0:43.1	decisions that her grandma made, that gave her a more nuanced view of her grandmother.
0:49.3	That's ahead.
0:51.1	How do you tell a story of painful losses and trauma that goes down through generations?
0:56.5	Well, for artist and author, Tessa Hulls, you're right, a graphic memoir, which not only tells
1:01.3	how her mother and her grandmother went through China's cultural revolution, but also
1:05.7	lets us see their pain through her drawings and her own legacy of trauma. The book is called Feeding Ghosts,
1:12.3	and author Tessa Hulls joins us now. Welcome to here and now. Thanks so much for having me.
1:17.6	Help us understand the title, Feeding Ghosts. What are the ghosts and what are presumably you
1:22.9	feeding them? Well, I grew up within this family where I knew that my grandmother had been
1:28.7	driven to madness in Maoist era China because of what happened to her as a dissident journalist.
1:34.0	And I sort of knew that this negative space was devouring my family. So to me, these ghosts were
1:40.6	the unfaced past that lived within my family. And I felt like my role as an author and as an artist was to give them nourishment by bearing
1:50.8	witness and listening to this story and finding out what it was that they had to say.
	...

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