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Honoring Women’s History Month, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) cordially invites you to an engaging conversation with Tessa Hulls, an artist, writer, and adventurer, as she delves into her genre-defying graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts. This touching narrative interweaves the lives of three generations of women in her family: her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and Tessa herself.

Extensively researched and beautifully rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Tessa’s homecoming, a vivid journey into the heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, she exposes the fears and traumas that haunt generations, along with the love that binds them together. Her graphic memoir is a testament to the enduring strength of family bonds, the complexities of history, and the power of storytelling. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain insights into her creative process and the profound themes that shape her work.

About Tessa Hulls

Tessa Hulls is an artist/writer/adventurer illuminating the connections between the present and the past. Her graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts explores the reverberations of her Chinese grandmother’s escape from the Communist regime and her subsequent mental illness. Her work addresses racial justice, the immigrant experience, generational trauma, mental health, the creative process, and the surprising feminist history of the bicycle.

About Feeding Ghosts

An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity.

In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women in her family: 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 eight years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter. Upon arrival, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, used the proceeds to put Rose in an elite boarding school—and promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution. Rose eventually came to the United States on a scholarship and brought Sun Yi to live with her.

Tessa watched 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 left home and traveled to the farthest-flung corners of the globe (Antarctica). But at the age of thirty, it starts to feel less like freedom and more like running away, and she returns home to face the history that shaped her family.

Extensively researched and gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is 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.