Author of
Feeding Ghosts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)
Tessa Hulls is an artist, writer and adventurer who is fascinated by the concept of home. As the daughter of two first-generation immigrants who landed in a tiny town of 350 people, she spent her formative years reading her way through the public library and roaming alone through the hills, and this love of solitude, research and forward motion informs much of her creative practice. Her restlessness has joyously dragged her across all seven continents, and her travels have led to everything from bartending in Antarctica to painting murals in Ghana to hosting book clubs in Denali National Park. After a 5,000 mile solo bike ride from Southern California to Maine in 2011, Tessa realized that for her, home means base camp: it's the staging ground she returns to between expeditions, and Tessa lives a semi-nomadic seasonal lifestyle that allows her to conduct creative field research in exceedingly remote places.
Tessa is a compulsive genre hopper and has worked in various capacities as an illustrator, cartoonist, editor, interviewer, writer, performer, chef, muralist, conductor of social experiments, painter, teacher, and researcher for organizations including The Washington Post, The Henry Art Gallery, The Rumpus, On the Boards, The Seattle Art Museum, Atlas Obscura, The Project Room, Washington Ensemble Theater, Washington Trails Association, Microsoft Research, and others. She is the recipient of grants from The Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and 4Culture, and is a Fellowship recipient from The Washington Artist Trust. She has been awarded residencies at Caldera Arts, PLAYA, Ucross, and others, and is the 2019 recipient of the PEN Northwest Margery Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency.
Tessa Hulls
Books by Tessa
Feeding Ghosts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)
Tessa Hulls’ stunningly original graphic novel memoir, Feeding Ghosts, is the story of her Chinese grandmother, her mother and herself. Combining elements of Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Nora Krug’s Belonging and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Feeding Ghosts sets out to reckon with two very complicated mothers (Tessa’s mother and grandmother) and the legacies of immigration and inherited trauma, and how growing up means understanding where you came from.
Tessa Hulls’ grandmother, Sun Yi, was a pro-Kuomintang journalist in 1940’s Shanghai and a beautiful woman with a string of powerful boyfriends. A Swiss diplomat fathered Tessa’s mother, Rose, but he left the country after the Communist takeover. In 1957, narrowly escaping the Great Leap Forward, Sun Yi and Rose fled to Hong Kong and within 3 months she had written a best-selling memoir about the 8 years she survived Communist China. She made enough money to put her daughter into the finest school, and then promptly had a breakdown and was committed to a mental institution. Rose came to America on a scholarship, married a Brit, and brought her mother to live with her. Tessa grew up in a house with her Chinese-speaking bi-polar grandmother; she watched her mother sacrifice her life to care for her, all the while smothering Tessa with her fear that she would be bipolar too. At 16, Tessa left home. She built a life as an adventurer, a painter, a chef and a feminist scholar. She cooked at remote Alaskan wilderness lodges in the summers, biked solo across Ghana and from Southern California to Maine. And then, at the age of 30, it all began to feel less like freedom and more like running away. She realized it was time to come home, and coming home meant trying to understand her mother--and her grandmother--and the history that had shaped her own life.
Tessa had her grandmother’s memoir translated, she began to study Chinese and Chinese history and she travelled to Hong Kong and China with her mother; Feeding Ghosts is the culmination of this journey. It will tell not only a hugely moving, revelatory story about her own family, one that is sure to resonate with anyone who has a complicated relationship with their parent, and with their own identity; it also illuminates—as Persepolis did—one country’s history in an extremely intimate and powerful way. Sun Yi’s life story happened to intersect with many of the important inflection points in Chinese history and Feeding Ghosts will serve as a primer on its recent past.