Tessa Hulls in Conversation with Diana Xin
Tessa Hulls is an artist, writer, and adventurer splitting time between Washington state and Alaska, among other places. She has worked in various capacities as an illustrator, lecturer, cartoonist, editor, interviewer, historian, writer, performer, chef, muralist, conductor of social experiments, painter, bicycle mechanic, teacher, and research for organizations including The Washington Post, The Henry Art Gallery, The Rumpus, The Seattle Art Museum, and others.
Her graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts (MCD at Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux) came out in March 2024 after nearly a decade of work. Hulls applies the lens of a historian and researcher to her own family, following the threads of intergenerational trauma, re-tracing the past through research trips with her mother and a translation of her grandmother’s memoir. The book also explores the impact of her grandmother’s mental health on herself and her mother, a matrilineal heritage of ghosts that follow the family from Japanese occupation through civil war and revolution, from Shanghai to Hong Kong to the U.S. These ghosts haunt Hulls in her travels to Antarctica, Ghana, and elsewhere, until she is able to write her way home by reckoning with her family’s past.
I spoke with Tessa on a video call from my childhood bedroom while she was in Montana on a break during her book tour.
Speaking of childhood homes and memories, I love how much of your childhood you bring into this book with the illustrations of beloved characters from familiar stories to the dinosaurs that show up throughout the book as we return to panels of you as the narrator and creator, at work in the artist studio. Can you tell me more about the dinosaurs? They seem like protectors and also facilitators of creativity.
Yes. Both. So, the little dinosaur paintbrush holders, they are corporeal objects. I did not invent them. I picked up Norbert the Brontosaurus at the bulk bins of Goodwill while in college, but then his utensil holes weren’t big enough to hold the brush pens that I used to draw the book. My very kind sculptor partner at the time made me Winnie the Triceratops. And so they just became the device by which I’m showing the reader that we’re in my studio, and I’m narrating from the present. As my narrator went more rogue as the story progressed, she started using the dinosaurs in more liberal ways. So by the end, she’s picking up the dinosaurs and marching them as time travel devices. That was definitely not my intention at the outset, but I think I’m somebody who’s always needed, given my creative process, a lot of space to roam and go feral.
They make for really great storytelling cues. That reminds me of the cowboy as well, another wonderful narrative device to highlight both the narrator’s interiority as well as the landscape of the west that imbues her with that sense of western independence that makes her different from her mother and grandmother. They seem like a way into the story.
Yeah, they were also like morale devices for me. This being nonfiction, I couldn’t change the fact that it was just an epically depressing story, both on the microcosm and the macrocosm. So as somebody who kind of spent my entire life trying to not get pulled into this world of relentless darkness that my mom and grandma wanted me to live in, it was a way for me to be like, fuck it, I am still going to be myself. I am still going to find ways to make this funny and absurd. At first, I just drew myself as a cowboy, and then I was like, well, if I’m a cowboy, I get to have a morale pony. Any time I feel like I need to just ride off on my pony, I can do that because I make the rules of my own universe.
It is dark subject matter, but I feel like you brought a lot of lightness to your universe. The levity is welcome. There were lots of great pieces of humor. Some of the interactions with your mother straight up made me laugh, especially in the moments of cultural translation and navigation, as well as the moments where I recognized my own mother.
I’m glad. I tried very hard. That’s when I feel the most satisfied—when people tell me that I did something funny.
There are a lot of tools we need to tell a dark story and to tell a story that’s truthful to ourselves. I think humor is one of them. Protection, as with the dinosaurs and the cowboy, is another. The cowboy creates some emotional distance. As the narrator states in the book, “I only know how to get close to something by first observing it from very far away.” The cowboy gives you the opportunity to ride away, but you also create that distance by digging into the research.
Here’s another quote I love: “Every memoir is a crafted act of highlight and omission.” How did this influence your research as you interacted with different source materials, including your mother’s recollections and your grandmother’s memoir, which you commissioned to be translated into English?
I can’t ever turn that lens off. It’s how my mind digests information. In a sense, I think that’s what my mind was trying to undo or let go of in the course of the book. I’m somebody who relied on narrative structures to make sense of the world. So I’m not somebody who can just experience things in real time, because I’m always pulling apart the threads, trying to understand exactly that—what is being omitted, what is being high-lighted, how is reality being moderated? For me, that’s why wilderness was such a boon, because it was the only place where I could disappear and turn that off and just exist in real-time in the world. Perhaps I wasn’t consciously aware of it from the outset, but this book was always going to have to tackle that question of how do we construct a story.
That reminds me of your grandmother, Sun Yi. The narrator describes scenes from Sun Yi’s memoir, Eight Years in Red Shanghai, with incredulity and skepticism. Sun Yi continues to rewrite and re-construct her story through the rest of her life. Narrative is powerful because you can shift and change a story, but you can also get stuck or trapped within a story. The challenge, I suppose, is to write yourself free or write yourself out, to save yourself or your family, to write a better conclusion, or to push it beyond the cycle that’s repeating. That seems to be part of the energy driving you to write this book.
For me, there wasn’t a choice. I think the moment my grandmother died—so in 2012—I realized I had no choice but to do this. I was born into being a writer and artist, I never could have been anything else. I used to question why I had been given this need to experience the world in story—and I ran from it for a number of years—but when Sun Yi died, I saw there was this generational echo of something that needed to be finished, and it needed somebody who was capable of essentially weaving herself back into the threads of the story to make it whole again.
There’s this quote I’ve loved ever since college. I only recently managed to locate the original text. It was on a print-out from a class on Chinese literature, but the text is from Stephen Owen’s Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature.
“Our repetitions are the scars of some incompletion, of imperfection: something in our lives stutters. Something is not content simply to be and to have been, but must try to be again and again, and never successfully and finally…. There is some maimed story that should have gone on in one direction, should have turned and ended differently, or simply ended. The sharper this thorn of imperfection, the more memory opens itself to variation. Memory becomes a hollow form, a rite of error in which new actors continually appear to play the familiar roles, in which bits and pieces of the familiar story are continually rearranged, in which new settings and circumstances are tried.”
This really resonated with your grandmother’s story for me—being forced to recount her days over and over, trying to make sense of what happened and reliving the trauma of being tracked and interrogated by the CCP.
I really like that. Have you ever read Susan Griffin? A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War? You should read that. That was one of the books that was most seminal in influencing Feeding Ghosts. I came across it because when I was living alone in the woods doing that “go feral” residency, I asked about 50 people to pick the one book they would take to a desert island. Vee Hua, 華婷婷, who translated my grandma’s memoir sent me a copy of A Chorus of Stones. Vee and I have always had this kind of bizarre spiritual connection, where we’ve always held the answer or resource the other needs in any given instance. They sent it to me not because it was their pick, but because they were like, I think this is the book you need while alone on a desert island for some reason. And they were completely right. The book looked at the ways that war and violence inscribe themselves onto the interior of a person, and who those hidden palimpsests then define our most intimate ties and ways of being in the world. Yeah, that book—I think there are some quotes from it that made it into Feeding Ghosts, I can’t remember, but highly recommend.
So the translation of your grandmother’s book was also something you took on for the work of this project. I love the parts where you’re interacting with that text and illustrating the scenes.
It was a locked box, and I knew that step one in understanding the story was gaining access to what was in there. Then when I started reading it, I knew immediately that the story I was trying to tell was infinitely more complicated than I’d thought.
I guess that goes back to that narrative reliability piece. You’re engaging with your grandmother through a piece that is also a performance, one that she’s trying to redo over time.
A performance and also the record of a mental breakdown. Perhaps one even she wasn’t aware of as it was happening.
Yeah. That was one of the sadder parts of the book for me—just how much our mental health care system failed in terms of language access, and then also the way the narrator is pathologized as a child.
It’s interesting on that front. I’m not going to use the word blame. I’m going to say a lot of the responsibility for that rests in my mother’s hands, because she was the one who was managing my grandmother’s care. There absolutely were ways in which my mom could have connected my grandma to people she could have spoken to because, you know, we were only an hour from San Francisco. My mom actually used to stay in touch with some of her Hong Kong classmates. When I was a kid, San Francisco was such a hub of Asian American communities that I remember sometimes someone would be in town or there would be a party. My mom would take me and my brother to go get dim sum with all her old classmates. I just think about it, where it was so close, where if my mom had recognized that necessity both for herself and for her mother, I do really wonder how different it would have been.
It seems like there was a point at which you became more isolated—both you and your grandmother—as you grew older.
Yeah. I think that’s a throughline of this story—the way in which trauma creates isolation. That, in turn, kept three generations of women in my family from connecting to other people. I think, for me, the hardest part of making this book was that in order to tell the story, I had to step into that very repetition that was the most painful state for me to be in. And I had to do it during the depths of Covid. Like, I’ve been thinking about the fact that making this book just beyond emotionally devastated me. It was because I had to make it in a state where I was alone in a room, endlessly writing the same story with no ability to leave.
There are strong echoes in that of the scenes of your grandmother writing alone in her room or in different in-patient facilities. But although there was a lot of isolation in creating the book, the community that you have around you really stands out in the last half of the book.
That led me to wonder about the different between codependence and interdependence and reflect on the line from the mother: “But codependence is very Chinese.” Thinking of it that way, is it necessarily a bad thing? And how do we find more ways to foster communities that care for each other?
Yeah, I don’t think that codependence is a bad thing in the context in which a functional Asian model is describing it, but I think it can really easily be weaponized as a tool to control others or a way to assert dominance. And woefully, that’s the model of it that I grew up with.
The thing my mother most wanted of her children was for us to end up good Chinese children. I’m saying good Chinese daughter in the broadest mythical sense of the word, like somebody who shows up and is accountable to the broader structures they inhabit, while also not allowing yourself to be consumed as an individual. And I think that tension is something that I will always be guided by.
The act of working on this book for a decade, ironically, brought me exactly what my mom always wanted me to have, which was an understanding of what it means to belong to an Asian American community. I don’t think I realized until pretty late in the game that there was another level of healing that was happening, where the act of having to spend so long excavating my family’s story was placing me within the fabric my mom always wanted me to be exposed to.
In searching through your family history, did you find more power and understanding in knowing, I guess, the origins of your own mythology—your family and the environment in which you were raised?
Yeah, absolutely. For me, context has always been the key to unlocking anything. Growing up, my family was a chess game, but I never was able to see the board. So you can observe movements, but without seeing the surface that they’re playing on, you can’t really glean the rules. In a way, I think I’ve always thought about writing and art as the act of constructing a landscape. Learning the Chinese history that underpinned my family was like trying to fill in all of the squares beneath these pieces that I was so intimately acquainted with, but I’d never possessed the understanding of those foundations to be able to grasp how the whole thing worked.
As you’re untangling your own story then, has this helped you in healing relationships and past hurts?
Oh, gosh, there’s a line from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: “They learned no compassion from their anguish. Thus their suffering was wasted.”
For me, I can’t help but love anything I understand. This book was my quest to answer what had always been a broken question. By getting to a point where I saw why everything went the direction that it did, it took me to a place of overwhelming tenderness for how much my mom and grandma were forced to shoulder, and a deeper appreciation of my own privilege and the duties that came along with it.
Yes, you have a beautiful line about bearing witness as the first generation, but needing to move far enough away from the pain to be able to see how deeply it is there.
I love the places where we see your mom and your grandmother as a child. There’s a lot of tenderness in how you evoke your mother’s childhood—her vulnerability and resilience. Through their stories, we also get a sense of place—how a place carries its own mythology and how it shapes our identities. In this case, of course, so much of the trauma is political, with your grandmother’s experiences in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
This is also a trauma that continues to repeat itself. With Hong Kong’s National Security Law and then Article 23 passing in March, we’ve seen so many young students and activists leaving and beginning to share their stories more widely. Also, the vast number of people who have been unable to leave, who are detained and awaiting their sentencing. Your grandmother’s story feels like a far-away tale but it’s still a reality people are experiencing today.
have put in like 80 pages, just going into the complexity of Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region. Also, the broken promises and the way that it is repeating and everything in my family’s story is becoming so much more pertinent in the last 15 years. I think about that a lot, how Hong Kong is right now, and the speed with which mainland China is rewriting history and essentially doing what they did in the 50’s and then again in the 60’s and 70’s. It’s amazing how quickly we can rewrite it so that people wake up and say, it’s always been like this. This is normal.
Yeah, and the fact that it’s just it’s so quiet now. There’s that line from your book, too, about the American frontier: “There’s great violence required to make a landscape empty.” That feels like an apt description right now—an empty landscape.
Absolutely. I remember thinking during my first research trip to Hong Kong, being at HKU and looking at the giant sculpture that was a memorial to Tiananmen Square. Even back less than a decade ago, you could have something like that in a public university. It’s unrecognizable so quickly.
Xin
There are many ways that collective memory persists, however. Your book, your documentation of your grandmother’s story—these all add to the different voices.
There are a few examples in your book about writing and narratives that can save lives. And then there are the narratives that we get stuck in and cannot find a way out. For you, what have been the most important aspects of creating a narrative that can heal?
Oof! I mean, I’ve always thought that my job is to create a trail to guide someone through a landscape. I guess if we’re going to extend that metaphor, my grandma just kind of wandered off and didn’t finish the trail, and my mom just sealed herself off from everything. I guess I wanted to give people a route by which they could find their own way out of whatever it was they were trying to navigate. And actually, back when I was feeling nothing but misery and dread around the process of this book release, a friend of mine who had a really messed up childhood said the first thing that started to make me feel like there was some point to having done all this. She grew up raised in a cult, and she texted me something along the lines of like, fuck you. I read your book. It made me have compassion for my mother for the first time. And she said, because of you, I actually found a trauma therapist and started seeing a therapist, and I hate you. That, to me, was the most heartwarming thing anyone could have told me. I think sometimes you need that reflection from others to understand why you put yourself through the hell of making something. And it made me realize that my audience, inasmuch as I had one, was fellow cowboys who were looking for a way in from the range, but didn’t know how to ask for help in finding it. If my book can help somebody find any route that’s not spending almost a decade of their life making a 400-page graphic novel, that would make me feel like I did something useful.
Xin
Thank you. I hope the ghosts feed you or have fed you through this project and continue to do so as this book makes its way out into the world to other people.
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