Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, Tessa Hulls in conversation with Manjula Martin

Please join us for a conversation between writer Manjula Martin and artist and writer Tessa Hulls, to celebrate Hulls's new book, Feeding Ghosts.

In this evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women: her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself.

Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong with her young daughter, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival—then promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution.

Growing up, Tessa watches her mother care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the weight of Sun Yi’s unexamined trauma and mental illness. Vowing to escape her mother’s smothering fear, Tessa leaves home and travels to the farthest, most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, her roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away, so she returns to face the history that shaped her family.

Extensively researched and gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Tessa Hulls’s homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, Feeding Ghosts exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.

Tessa Hulls was the guest artist in the 2019 MAH exhibition, Guided by Ghosts, where she unpacked her Chinese ancestry and the stories behind Santa Cruz County’s vanished Chinatowns. She will be in conversation with her friend, writer and editor Manjula Martin, taking questions from the audience.

Signed copies of Feeding Ghosts will be available for purchase on March 16th at Bookshop Santa Cruz.