“Of all my demon spirits I need you the most”
Feeding Ghosts, the first comic by Tessa Hulls, is a big thick slab o’ memoir, if you can handle that! 
It’s published by MCD Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (publishers are so complicated these days!), and we’re going to dive right into it!
Feeding Ghosts is a powerful book, and there’s no way I’m going to be able to do it justice in a short review. Remember the olden days when I had that really long review of Habibi (hey, you don’t need to remember – there it is!), which was also a powerful and challenging book? Yeah, I don’t have time to do that these days, so I apologize. Feeding Ghosts is, I think, better than Habibi, and it is also powerful and challenging. It’s 379 pages of dense reading, and in a perfect world, I’d read it once or twice more before reviewing it. But I have other things to do, so I’ll give it a go!
Hulls is a first-time comics writer, which means that she occasionally falls into the trap of the first-time comics writer and uses a lot of prose, but because she’s a visual artist as well, she doesn’t allow the prose to run away with her too much, and she even apologizes for it at times (Hulls herself is the narrator of the book, as it is, I noted, a memoir). Feeding Ghosts is a book about Hulls coming to terms with her mother and grandmother, both of whom had a powerful effect on her life. It’s also a personal history of China in the Communist era, as Hulls’s grandmother, Sun Yi, lived through the pre-Communist times in China and the early part of the Communist regime (she was born in 1927 and fled to Hong Kong in 1957, while Hulls’s mother, Rose, was born in 1950). 
She wrote a book about the early Communist years and became a minor celebrity, but she also had a severe mental illness that began around the time of her flight to Hong Kong that crippled her for the rest of her life (she died in 2012). Hulls was born in 1984, and throughout the book, she’s trying to reconcile a LOT of things about her family and her position in it. Hulls was born in the States, so she considers herself American, but a good deal of the book is about her complicated genetic history. Her grandfather – her mother’s father – was a Swiss diplomat who got Sun Yi pregnant but had no interest in staying in China to help, and when his job was over, he left her behind. Hulls’s father is also white, so while she has a Chinese heritage, she doesn’t consider herself “Chinese,” which is clearly important to her grandmother and mother. Of course, this being America, she’s “Chinese” enough to experience racism from her peers, because what’s America without some racism? Hulls doesn’t want to be Chinese and doesn’t want to deal with her grandmother and doesn’t understand why her mother acts the way she does, so the book is partly about her flight from her family – a literal one, as Hulls traveled the world in her 20s to get away from her family – and her return to address her own problems with her life and how she needed to understand what was going on in the past to move into the future. 
It’s a lot, in other words.
I’d like to go more into it, but that would get really, really long, and the way Hulls tells the story is actually pretty interesting. She meanders around, moving back and forth through time, moving from political history to personal history, from the cultural history of China to her own travels around the globe, and she does it quite well, weaving a complex tapestry that encompasses decades and landmasses and depths of emotions. She does this because, as she puts it, it’s very hard to understand her circumstances unless you understand what was going on in China during the 20th century and what Chinese culture is like. Obviously, this is a bit of a sketch, because she can’t go too far into it, but it’s still fascinating and necessary. What’s most fascinating, to me, is the distinction that Hulls makes between Chinese culture and American culture. Her mother is scornful of American culture, because it’s a product of a melting pot, whereas China is much more a monoculture with traditional values. Hulls points out in many ways how, despite the comfort of traditional Chinese values, they’re also constricting, something her mother refuses to see. Hulls is not dismissive of either Chinese or American culture, as she is shaped by both, and it’s nice to read a book by someone who is part of a non-American, traditional culture who sees both the benefits of being American and the restrictions of a “traditional” culture without being biased against either. Hulls is able to examine her “Chinese-ness” without blindly lauding the values of the culture, and she’s able to criticize “American-ness” without rejecting its virtues. It’s refreshing.
As for her personal journey, this is where the book challenges me a bit, because I’m approaching it from such a different direction. 
Hulls is a woman, so of course I’m not going to be able to empathize with what she or her mother and grandmother go through, although I do try. But that’s not exactly what I’m talking about. Hulls is trying to find her own place in the world, which is fine, and she decides she needs to do that through learning about her family. This hangs me up a bit, and I’ll ‘splain. I know my parents and grandparents, and nothing else. My grandparents’ parents immigrated to this country from various places in Europe, but for someone who likes history so much, I’m not terribly interested in hunting through my family tree. I know people who are, and more power to them, but it just doesn’t interest me. Hulls can head to China and try to find out more about her family history, and that’s great, and the way she tells it is interesting. I just don’t get it as a way to learn more about yourself. That’s all. If I knew my great-great-grandfather was a murdering Cossack on the Polish plains back in 1850, would it matter? Not to me. If I knew my great-great-great-grandmother ministered to Scottish soldiers on the field at Culloden, would it change me? Of course not. I never understand stories in which the main character – in this case, Hulls – thinks that knowing more about her grandmother’s flight from Shanghai in 1957 is going to make any difference in her own life. She yearns for a better relationship with her mother, and she learns a lot about her mother thanks to her journey to China, and again, that’s great, but … it doesn’t quite resonate with me. It’s a “me” problem, I get it, because it certainly does resonate with a lot of people, but those parts of the story where she’s grappling with what her grandmother’s plight means for her didn’t work for me as well. 
It’s frustrating, for a few reasons: it’s done well, and it makes sense, so I can see why it’s part of Hulls’s mental make-up; I know that for many people, it’s important, and I certainly don’t want to belittle their experiences; and it’s something that always make me wonder if I’m lacking something in my own mental make-up because I don’t really care about it. I tried to resist rolling my eyes at some of the things Hulls writes about, because I think, “You know, it’s possible you should just get over it,” but I admit that sometimes I failed! However, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s well done, and it’s clear that Hulls gains a great deal from it, so despite the fact that it doesn’t hit me as emotionally as I’m sure it does other people, it’s still a fascinating part of the overall narrative.
For a first-time comic writer, Hulls does a nice job as a writer getting out of her own way in the art department. Despite the fact that there are big chunks of prose in this book, Hulls does a lot of nice work on the art. This is not only a dense book, writing-wise, but art-wise, as Hulls crams a lot onto the page but still manages to keep everything legible. She uses a lot of heavy brush strokes to add weight to the drawings, and everything feels thicker and tougher because of it, from the clothing to the environment. It’s not a fine line, so her details can become a bit smudgy, but she doesn’t do a lot of stuff that needs intricate detail, so it’s not a big deal. 
She uses the heavy brushing to create monstrous images springing from her imagination to show more abstract moments in the histories she’s delving into, and it’s a powerful way to conceptualize some of the more horrific things that happened to her, her family, and China in general. She creates a separate persona for her mother, a “ghost” that is able to push away any emotion, and gives this ghost a porcelain mask as a face, which is wonderfully creepy image whenever it shows up. She uses powerful, almost surreal images to show the “ghosts” haunting her family – they’re waves and loops and whorls, crashing in on the characters and bending them into ungainly shapes. When she wants to show a character breaking through these ghosts, she uses white negative space to create branches and roads that break through the dark, heavily inked “ghosts.” Like a lot of neophyte comics creators, Hulls has a bit of difficulty with perspective and motion, but not to the point where it wrecks or even distracts too much from the rest of the art. Overall, this is gorgeous and compelling art, helping with the storytelling instead of being subservient to Hulls’s words. That’s always nice to see.
Feeding Ghosts is a marvelous comic, as Hulls is able to make a story that has coming-of-age elements into a grand historical narrative and how our past impacts our present and what we can do about it. If you don’t know much about China’s 20th century, this is a good primer, and Hulls digs very deeply into the way historical events can wreck so much, not only in the present, but into the future, as well. You can find the book on Amazon, if you’re interested!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
