Tessa Hulls is in her thirties, the second child of two first-generation immigrants to the US, brought up in a tiny Northern California town where she and her brother were the only people at all like them. Her mother Rose is mixed-race, born in tumultuous 1950 Shanghai to a Swiss diplomat who had already run back home before the birth and a Chinese journalist, Sun Yi, who thought she could weather any storm.
Hulls tells the story of all three women, over the last hundred years, in Feeding Ghosts, a magnificent, impressive first graphic novel all about the ways Tessa and Rose, and Sun Yi before them, are haunted by history.
Hulls is the one telling the story, and that frames it all: she has those core American concerns of "who am I?" and "where did I come from?" Making it more complicated, she's here exploring her Chinese identity as the daughter of two generations of Chinese women who had children with European men, and as someone raised in America entirely in the English language.
One more thing: one very big thing. Sun Yi was moderately famous: she escaped China for Hong Kong in the late 1950s, when Rose was a child, and wrote a scandalous memoir of her life under the Communist upheavals of the previous decade. She got her daughter, Rose, accepted into a very highly regarded boarding school in Hong Kong, despite not really having the money to pay for it. And then she mentally collapsed. Sun Yi spent the next two decades in and out of mental hospitals and was eventually cared for by her daughter in America starting in 1977, when Rose was 27. Rose spent her teen years in that boarding school, alternately worrying about her mother's care and being molded to be part of an internationalist elite. And then Rose fled to America, first for college, then for a brief nomadic freedom that her daughter would eventually emulate.
Let me pull that all together: Tessa Hulls, whom a lot of Americans would cruelly call "one-quarter Chinese," grew up in a town with no other Chinese people. Just a mother, quirky and specific and tightly controlled, the kind of mother who has Rules for everything that are rarely said explicitly, never explained, seemingly arbitrary, and core to her concept of the world. And a grandmother, trapped in her own head, scribbling every day as if she was eternally re-writing that famous memoir, and speaking only the smallest bits of broken English. That mother and grandmother spoke a different language together - I think mostly the dialect of Shanghai - which they never taught Tessa. "Chinese" was that language, that mysterious past, the symbol for all that was hidden and frightening and different for Hulls growing up.
Hulls has a lot to get through in Feeding Ghosts: a lot of family history and related world history, a lot of nuance and cultural detail that she learned as she was researching her family's past. She tells it all mostly in sequence, after a brief prologue, but "Tessa Hulls" is present throughout, our narrator and filter, the voice telling us how she learned the story almost as much as she tells the story itself. This is a story unearthed and told, not something pretending to be purely dry and factual. It's not an exaggeration to say it's primarily about Tessa's journey, how she decided to figure out this tangled knot of her family history, to do it with her mother as much as possible, to reconcile the two of them and try to come to a place here they could better meet and understand each other.
Hull's pages are organic, specific, inky. She uses swirling white outlines on a black background as a visual element regularly - the pull of all of those ghosts, if you want to be reductive - to open and close chapters, and more subtly in the backgrounds of fraught moments.
One of the hallmarks of a great big book is that it leaves you wanting to know more. I was enthralled by the stories of young Sun Yi and Rose, and how Tessa learned what they did and what it meant. (The latter is the more important thing, in an ancient, rule-bound, formalistic society like China - maybe even more so in a time of such transition and upheaval as the early Communist years.) But I felt that she was less forthcoming about her own youth. This is very much a story of these three women, but I wondered about other figures: Hulls's father is almost entirely absent, signposted as a British man with a thicker accent than Rose and seen only a handful of times. And Tessa's brother, just one year older, growing up in this same house and environment, is even less present - did he feel any of these pressures? Or was this so much a matrilineal thing, tied into those cultural assumptions of what men and women do, that he was able to "be American" in ways more closed to Tessa?
But that's not the story Hulls is telling. And every story casts shadows: the story that-is dimly showing flickers of other stories that could have been, or might yet be. The brightest, most brilliant stories cast the clearest shadows - that may be why I wonder so much about Hull's father and brother; they're dark, mysterious shadows just outside the circle of these three women, brilliantly illuminated and seen in depth.
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