Feeding Ghosts – A Graphic Memoir

by Melanie Anspacher

Tessa Hulls’ 2025 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Feeding Ghosts, is nothing short of extraordinary.  Meticulously researched and created by the author over nearly a decade and filled with beautifully detailed etching-like illustrations that richly cover each page, this work tells not one but many stories that span three generations and as many continents. At the heart of the memoir is Hulls’ grandmother Sun Yi’s severe mental illness and the devastating impact it has on generations of her family. It is told through the emotional and physical journey Hulls takes with her mother, Rose, to piece together and comprehend this history, and set in the context of Sun Yi’s life in China during the Japanese occupation (1937 – 1945)and the early years of the Communist regime (1949-1957).  Hulls’ own experiences, interpretations and reflections are accompanied by the powerful voices of Sun Yi’s translated memoir, written in 1958, and her mother’s childhood journals.  Hulls brings the reader along on this journey, retracing train rides, rediscovering sites of significance such as her grandmother’s apartment in Shanghai, poring over historic documents and newspaper articles and conducting countless interviews with family members. As Hulls tells us, “The scale of what I’ve had to learn for this book has been so massive and so drawn out that I sometimes forget I began with only my three paltry grandmother facts: China, writer, crazy” (p 81).

Hulls’ grandmother Sun Yi grows up in a relatively well-off farming family in Suzhou, China.  She and her family flee to escape the Japanese occupation, during which time she witnesses unspeakable atrocities which she later admits led her to shut herself off emotionally. Sun Yi then lives in Shanghai, working as a journalist, where she engages in a relationship with a Swiss diplomat and becomes pregnant with Rose.  He avoids any relationship with his daughter but plays a vital role financially supporting them for years. Sun Yi defiantly stays in Shanghai even as her safety as a journalist is increasingly threatened.  She is further traumatized, subjected to frequent interrogations and forced confessions, and struggles to feed her daughter.  When an opportunity comes for her to obtain an exit visa, she flees with Rose to Hong Kong in a perilous journey hiding in the false bottom of a fishing boat. She writes her memoir of these years which is published in Hong Kong in Mandarin, with a positive response, but is unable to be read by her family in mainland China until decades later.

With Sun Yi’s memoir abruptly ending, Hulls turns to examining Rose’s own childhood trauma.   She learns that during those years in Hong Kong, Sun Yi became increasingly paranoid and erratic, often acting out of a desire to protect her daughter from imagined dangers.  With Sun Yi severely incapacitated by mental illness and institutionalized at the age of 34, Rose no longer receives love or support from a capable parent. With only vague knowledge of the institution and mental illness treatment, Rose develops what Hulls refers to frequently as her “fear”.  As the only one who can assuage her mother, by necessity Rose defends her and becomes her own mother’s caretaker by the time she is only thirteen.   Enrolled in a prestigious boarding school through class privilege not afforded to their family in Shanghai, Rose is initially shielded from the stigma of her mother’s illness. Once discovered, she persists in hiding it from others, taking long train trips alone to visit Sun Yi and bringing her to doctor’s visits. Rose moves to the U.S. to study, settles in a small coastal town, and ultimately brings Sun Yi to live with her in the U.S. in 1977.  A few years later, Rose meets and marries Hulls’ father.  She continues her lifelong role of primary caretaker to Sun Yi, while also dutifully maintaining her home and raising her two children.

Throughout Hulls’ childhood, she fearfully witnesses Sun Yi’s incessant writing, frequent wandering out of their home, and occasional need to be restrained.  Sun Yi constantly obsesses about Rose’s whereabouts, becoming increasingly distraught as the day drags on despite daily written notes to reassure her when Rose would be home.  Rose in turn goes to great lengths to fabricate an alternate reality to protect Sun Yi, dying her hair to avoid awareness of aging and even creating a fake publishing contract so Sun Yi can believe she was still a successful writer.  Even as a child, Hulls knows that this relationship seems dually enabling and perpetuates a vicious cycle of “collaborative fabrication” (75).  Hulls laments not being able to communicate with or truly know Sun Yi, due to the language barrier, the severity of her illness and the fear it instilled in her.

Hulls develops a fraught relationship with her mother that will take decades to reconcile.  While she frequently reminds the reader how much she was loved and cherished by her mother, she found her mother’s expression of love oppressive. As Hulls gets older and appropriately seeks more autonomy and independence, Rose desperately tries to protect her, conjuring imagined threats and dangers causing Hulls to feel like something is fundamentally wrong with her.  Hulls realizes this type of childhood isn’t normal, like in a horror movie “when you figure out the phone calls are coming from inside the house” (231). Hulls responds by retreating into herself, turning to books and her imagination, and becomes increasingly angry and volatile which Rose inevitably sees as signs of mental illness.  By her teenage years Hulls has seen a parade of mental health providers and is given daily medication ritualistically along with Sun Yi.  In her later teenage years Hulls finally breaks free, spending more and more time with friends, until she leaves her small town and family completely.

This begins a long period in the author’s life where, under her alter ego as a cowboy, she finds freedom in travel and great comfort in nature.  Through her self-described cowboy persona, she seeks freedom in adventure while knowingly repressing the emotional turmoil of her childhood and shielding herself behind a hard exterior. She crosses the country by bicycle, works as a cook in Antarctica where she begins creating comics, and grows a community of friends from whom she draws great support.  Her relationship with her mother is compartmentalized and played out only during extremely emotional annual visits. After many years, she is inspired by a quote from Willa Cather’s O Pioneers, “Freedom so often means one isn’t needed anywhere” (328). Hulls recognizes her own loneliness and realizes she cannot continue running away. Her capacity to reconnect with her mother leads to the long collaboration needed to complete the research for this memoir and to begin to mend their relationship.

Hulls’ illustrations are truly mesmerizing and imbued with intricately imagined metaphor and sometimes humor.  Rooted in Chinese mythology, the ghosts are symbolic of spirits that didn’t accomplish what they wanted to and roam the earth with an “insatiable appetite” (18).  The recurring background illustration invokes the mouths of ghosts eerily howling into a void. Ghosts appear not just representing her family’s past, but as those oppressed by Chinese Communist authority or victims of the famine during the Great Leap Forward (1958 – 1962). Living characters’ bodies are often drawn with exoskeletons, perhaps representing their vulnerability or revealing hidden emotions; skulls are opened to examine the brains within.  Experiencing her mother as exhibiting dual co-existing personalities that can switch without warning, Hulls depicts the stoic, cold and oppressive version of her mother as the “ghost twin”, illustrated as a stark white emotionless mask. In trying to protect her daughter, her mother is drawn purging herself of ghosts only to deposit them in Hulls’ body, and Hulls carries this burden until she recognizes and rejects the ghosts in her late teenage years.

The rich illustrations are steeped in metaphor, each able to capture the reader’s attention with great creativity and profound meaning. Hulls inserts her present-day self frequently as narrator, sitting at her work desk accompanied by dinosaur-shaped pencil and brush holders that seem to be a touchstone of her childhood, but also appear to represent the presence of her mother and grandmother in her work.  Hulls compares Sun Yi’s mental illness to a Russian nesting doll inside the larger context of Communist China (143), as well as to birds that were intentionally driven to death by incessant noise during the Communist disastrous campaign to eliminate pests (145). Representing the emotional control Rose had, Hulls draws herself as a puppet with Rose the puppet-master (256). Rose’s constant fear of catastrophe touching her family in the form of mental illness is drawn in a humorous analogy as the well-known children’s story Chicken Little (185).

When Hulls begins the work to create this memoir, she recognizes she must face and feel the ghosts that permeate the story. She gains a deeper understanding and greater empathy for her mother’s lack of a normal childhood and role reversal to Rose being caretaker of an adult with mental illness.  Rose admits to fearing she or Hulls would develop the same mental illness as Rose’s mother, and this instilled a sense of terror in her that she projected onto her family.  Hulls is ultimately able to find a delicate balance with her mother, where their stories and versions of their relationship can co-exist. The challenges of their relationship are never completely resolved, yet they do experience some rare moments of peace and ease together. Toward the end, Hulls’ cowboy faces the ghost twin of her mother, illustrating a tenuous understanding between them.

Throughout the memoir, Hulls shares her struggle with her own cultural identity and its evolution in creating this work.  She describes how she never identified as either Chinese or American, and constantly wrestles with imposter syndrome in both cases. In one example, while in Hong Kong, a waitress offers her a fork instead of chopsticks, and Hulls lifts the fork up as a symbol of “the series of conclusions” drawn based on appearances and cultural biases (159).  Through her research she first learns about the history of the Eurasian class in Hong Kong, a group she narrates identification with “where people simply knew what I was and had a name for it” (154). Growing up in the only Chinese family in small otherwise white community, she often feels like an outsider, yet cherishes the memories of throwing their annual Chinese New Year’s parties for the community (240). Regrettably Hulls’ mother chooses not to teach her and her brother Chinese, further complicating her identity as she gets older and faces others’ expectations of her abilities, particularly when visiting and researching her family in China.  Having abandoned language studies in college, she successfully embarks on studying Mandarin and is able to have a brief conversation with a relative on her second visit to Suzhou, a profound moment that she says she could have lived off for years (343).

The process of writing and illustrating the memoir proves to be a healing process for the author.  After recounting a repetitive multi-generational pattern of suffering trauma and escaping, both physically and emotionally, she lightens the burden of the stories her family has carried by putting them on paper.  Feeding Ghosts truly is a masterpiece in the genre of graphic literature, and should help to lift stigma and encourage conversation around mental health.

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Melanie Anspacher is a pediatrician in Washington, DC, with interests in graphic medicine and medical humanities.