“Feeding Ghosts” by Tessa Hulls is a story of a three generational Chinese family who deals with obligation and cultural issues but mixed with mental illness and trauma. I will be honest I really didn’t like the art style. The story was interesting but because the art was such a big part of it I couldn’t really like the plot too much. 1 out of 5 stars from me. ( )

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through Netgalley. Content warning for violence including murder, assassination, and sexual assault, as well as generational and interpersonal trauma and mental illness.)

So I was originally approved to review this title on NetGalley waaaay back in October 2023, but after slogging through the first few pages, I quickly gave up: the text was too small and pixelated to read without getting a massive headache. (Note to publishers: please do better!) That alone was almost enough to turn me off of FEEDING GHOSTS, but I'm so thankful that I picked up a physical copy when it finally turned up at my local library, some eight months later. FEEDING GHOSTS is likely one of my favorite graphic novels of 2024, and THE single best graphic novel memoir I've ever read.

Author Tessa Hulls is a second generation immigrant; her mother came to America from Hong Kong as a college student, eventually settling down in a small rural town in California. Seven years later, Rose brought her own mother, Sun Yi, to join her. A former journalist who faced persecution in China, Sun Yi's struggle with mental illness seemingly began after she published her 1958 memoir, EIGHT YEARS IN RED CHINA, which became an instant bestseller (although Sun Yi only saw proceeds from the books' first print run). She hung on just long enough to get herself and her young daughter to safety - fleeing China for Hong Kong - and then slowly slipped into psychosis. (Aside from later dementia, Hulls doesn't elaborate on Sun Yi's specific diagnoses.)

As a child, Tessa only knew her grandmother as a vaguely defined shadow. Sun Yi and Tessa did not share a common language and, even if they did, Sun Yi remained glued to her desk most of the day, obsessively (re)writing the story of her life. Yet the relationship between Sun Yi and Rose - not as mother and daughter, but dependent and caregiver - cast a shadow on Tessa's own relationship with her mother, who saw her as another broken thing to be fixed.

After college, Tessa left home in pursuit of the freedom that only the wild frontier could provide a cowboy like herself: bicycling solo from California to Maine; taking on seasonal work in Alaska and Antarctica. But after the death of Sun Yi, Hulls begins to question the efficacy of her "no strings attached" lifestyle. She spends six months holed up in a cabin, drafting the outline of this book. She gets a grant to have Sun Yi's memoir translated into English, and another to travel to Hong Kong and China in pursuit of her matrilineal history. (Hulls's father is British; her mother's father, Swedish.)

The result is FEEDING GHOSTS, an absolutely epic story that adeptly demonstrates how the personal is political, and vice versa. Hulls excavates several generations of trauma, showing how political violence and repression fractures communities, families, and minds - including those of the survivors' descendants, born decades after the fact. The women in this story are complex, multi-layered individuals, who sometimes do the 'wrong' thing despite having the best of intentions. Hulls weaves the stories of her mother's and grandmother's lives with the history of China, resulting in a rich tapestry that's often painful to behold.

I guess my only complaint is Hulls's harsh judgment of her grandmother as a "gold digger" (although she does revise this somewhat towards the end of the narrative). Whether Sun Yi used her beauty to ensure the safety of herself and Rose is really immaterial, imho; the problem lies in social structures that value women for these attributes, such that their very survival depends on it. And what of the men who willingly participated in these transactions? Hulls seems to view them as dupes rather than active participants. Idk, the very term seems painfully outdated to this Gen X-er, and I've got a good decade on the author. ( )