My ghosts told me I had to do this,” Tessa Hulls says over the phone from Toronto, one of more than thirty stops on her book tour. “You know how Chinese ghosts are—they’re super pushy.” Feeding Ghosts, a 400-page graphic memoir detailing generational trauma, was published in March 2024. Released at last from an all-consuming nine-year project, Hulls is determined to sink her teeth into all the joy and agency once again available to her.

Feeding Ghosts threads together the narratives of three generations of women. Hulls’s maternal grandmother, Sun Yi, was a dissident journalist in Shanghai. She faced severe political persecution during the Communist Revolution, enduring years’ worth of pressure that culminated in acute mental distress and hospitalisation upon fleeing to Hong Kong. The story then turns to Yi’s daughter, Rose—Tessa’s mother—before landing on the author in rural America. We experience Hulls making sense of the familial wounds that the women of her family have fielded across each generation. Undertaking this book in good faith was the only method she could think of to repair her relationship with her mother and make sense of the responsibilities borne by each generation. Opting in on this journey felt like “what I needed and what my family’s ghosts needed”.

• Tags: China, Issue 37, Kang-Chun Cheng, Tessa Hulls