Grandma, mother, daughter: how 3 generations of Chinese women’s emotional story is told in graphic novel
- From Communist China to Hong Kong and the US, memories of three women and the traumas they carried with them form the heart of Tessa Hulls’ debut graphic novel
Growing up, Tessa Hulls would observe her elderly Chinese grandmother in her room, feverishly writing Chinese characters that Hulls did not understand.
Meanwhile, her relationship with her Shanghai-born biracial mother, Rose, was fraught with cultural differences, which caused the American-born Hulls to leave home as a young adult.
Hulls knew her grandmother, Sun Yi, was from Suzhou, in Jiangsu province, that she worked as a journalist in Shanghai and published a bestselling memoir. But Hulls did not attempt to find out more until after she died, in 2012.
Three years later Hulls threw herself into researching Chinese history, interviewing family members, learning Mandarin and travelling to Hong Kong and Shanghai to retrace her grandmother and mother’s steps.
Hulls’ first graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, the fruit of seven years’ work, was published by Macmillan this March. It is raw, intense and honest.
Drawing and writing out stories of intergenerational trauma from 1920s China to 1950s Hong Kong, to the present-day United States gave Hulls a much more nuanced understanding not only of her grandmother and mother, but also herself.
