Feeding GhostsFeeding Ghosts

"Persepolis meets Crying in H Mart in this ravishing graphic memoir of three generations of women whose lives have been shaped by the violence and paranoia that marked the early years of the People's Republic of China. In 1957, Tessa Hulls' grandmother, Sun Yi, a Shanghai journalist, fled to Hong Kong in the false bottom of a fishing boat with her daughter, Rose, to escape repeated interrogation by China's Communist government. Within months of arrival, Sun Yi had written a bestselling memoir titled Eight Years in Red Shanghai: Love, Starvation and Persecution, made enough money to put her daughter into the finest school, then promptly had a breakdown and was committed to a mental institution. Years later, Rose moved to the United States on a scholarship, married a British man, and brought Sun Yi to live with them. Tessa grew up watching her mother sacrifice her life to care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the crushing weight of Sun Yi's unexamined trauma and subsequent mental illness. Desperate to free herself from her mother's smothering fear that she had inherited Sun Yi's instability along with her creative instincts, Tessa leaves home at sixteen, building a life as an adventurer and scholar, seeking the farthest flung parts of the globe to call home. But as she approaches thirty, it all starts to feel less like freedom and more like running away. Tessa decides it is time to come home, to confront and examine the history that has shaped her family's life. Extensively researched and gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Tessa Hulls’ homecoming: a vivid, revelatory, and intimate journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the backdrop of one of the darkest periods of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, Feeding Ghosts exposes the fear and trauma that haunts generations, and the love that holds them together."--