By Janet Song
Tessa Hulls’ debut, Feeding Ghosts, knows its own ambition as a graphic novel. Reading it, I couldn’t help but notice its similarities to Q.M. Zhang’s hybrid novel/memoir, Accomplice to Memory, both in subject and form. Both books feature Chinese American authors of mixed identities attempting to locate their relatives’ pasts in Chinese history and what brought their families from China, to Hong Kong, and finally, the United States. Both books attempt to do this through a hybrid mixture of forms: for Zhang, this is through photography, memoir, and fiction, and for Hulls, this is through memoir, photography, and the archives, all interwoven with Hulls’ illustrations. And like Zhang, Hull makes apparent the daunting difficulty of bringing her family’s stories into what is now Feeding Ghosts. “[A]ll history is contested,” she states. “But what is a family if not a shared story? And what is a fissure if not a place where truths diverge?”
For Hulls, tracing the story of her grandmother, Sun Yi, and her eventual mental decline becomes a difficult frontier of which Hulls must navigate its unfamiliar geography, discerning from archives, her family’s oral recollections, and Hulls’ personal memory what is the “true” story of Sun Yi’s life. This truth, as Feeding Ghosts progresses, is one Hulls comes to realize she cannot fully obtain as she meets the contradictions between the archives and personal memory. Feeding Ghosts features translations of her grandmother’s writings, including Sun Yi’s memoir, Eight Years in Red Shanghai (红色上海八年). Hulls paints her grandmother as a storyteller much like herself, not only because Sun Yi was a former journalist, but also because, as Hulls writes, the Sun Yi of Eight Years in Red Shanghai “is a character she created, a series of choices that serve the narrative she wanted to tell … Every memoir is a crafted act of highlight and omission.” As she finds inconsistencies between Sun Yi’s narrative and her own memory of her grandmother—such as Sun Yi proclaiming to be proficient in English or Sun Yi’s depictions of Hulls’ mother, Rose—Hulls struggles throughout Feeding Ghosts to decipher Sun Yi’s constructed version of reality versus its actuality. These inconsistencies are all part of Hulls’ desire to uncover what she describes as the “negative space of [Sun Yi’s] story.” Feeding Ghosts does not simply tell Sun Yi’s story; it makes apparent that said story is incomplete, filled with omissions either to protect the identities of those Sun Yi knew, or because, as Hulls reminds us time and time again, “[the] book itself was perhaps a symptom of her collapse, making her a deeply unreliable narrator.”
What results is a complex depiction of Sun Yi, entangled with the chaos of the Sino-Japanese War (also known as the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in China), Chinese Civil War, and Cultural Revolution. Particularly remarkable in Feeding Ghosts is Hulls’ attentiveness to Sun Yi’s anti-communist sympathies. Though Hulls lays out the tremendous violence and devastating death toll during Mao’s regime, she is also privy to Sun Yi’s classism, which inform her anti-communist stances, desire for upward class ascendance, and bourgeois tastes. We are left with an examination of the Cultural Revolution that is critical of its aftermath, yet nevertheless is conscious of and makes an effort to recognize the class structures which facilitated its emergence and of which Sun Yi and her daughter, Rose, are active benefactors of. Complicating this is Sun Yi’s liaisons with white foreigners in Shanghai, one of which results in the birth of Rose. Hulls writes, “[Sun Yi] is a contradiction, simultaneously portraying herself as a plucky heroine standing up to the insanity of the Communist Party, and the calculating seductress using the currency of her body to survive.”
It is not just Sun Yi who is a contradiction, however. Hulls also highlights her mother as a contradiction, especially with Rose’s memory of China and Sun Yi. Hulls writes, “All children of immigrants face gaps when trying to reconstruct our parents’ pasts. We try to reverse engineer the missing pieces. But we shape them with our own cultural understandings, thus arriving at conclusions that are simultaneously correct and completely wrong.” For Hulls, these conclusions are shaped by her mother’s relationship to China, in which mother and daughter are positioned in a Chinese versus American binary against each other. And while Hulls is aware that compared to her mother, she has a weaker foundation on Chinese culture, she also emphasizes that her mother’s version of China is an “idealized mythology.” Rose’s version of China is further complicated by her background as a Eurasian who, thanks to Sun Yi’s efforts to escape to Hong Kong, has the privilege of studying at the Diocesan Girls’ School, described by Hulls as “an elite colonial institution” that teaches Rose English and imbues her in European culture. Just as Hulls struggles to pull out a truth from the contradiction that is her grandmother, Hulls also struggles to figure out what to make of her mother—is she “a tragic charity case, psychologically orphaned by the traumas suffered by her refugee mother? Or a privileged colonial Eurasian, being groomed for the echelons of the elite?”
What Hulls does not realize is that the truths she seeks are from the above contradictions themselves. Sun Yi and Rose’s stories are part of a larger story of China trying to reconstruct itself in the aftermath of Western imperialism, including the Opium Wars and the handover of Hong Kong. It is this history, the century of humiliation (百年国耻), that continues to shape Chinese politics today. In her epilogue to The Chinese Question, historian Mae Ngai, writing of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, highlights how “China’s century of humiliation under Western imperialism” is what informs Chinese nationalist attitudes towards “situat[ing] China’s new global role as a repair of deep historical injustice.” I would’ve liked to see Hulls tie Feeding Ghosts alongside this political context, yet perhaps I am asking for too much. History overflows Feeding Ghosts, so much so that the information Hulls provides as background for her family’s story sometimes feels repetitive (and Hulls is aware of this, sometimes directly assuring the reader that the bulk of information she provides is relevant). It is history that is both overwhelming for Hulls and us as readers, so it makes sense that Hulls tries to contain it within a story about intergenerational trauma and her attempt to finally confront said trauma. I already feel the heaviness of that trauma in Feeding Ghosts’ 386 pages, and I am not sure if adding more of its weight would be bearable for me as its reader.
I do also see the potential of Hulls tying Feeding Ghosts to an American political and cultural context in her evocations of the cowboy figure. Throughout Feeding Ghosts, the cowboy serves as a persona for Hulls to escape the demands imposed on her by Rose to be a “good Chinese daughter.” Through the cowboy, Hulls “retreat[s] into the romance of the Wild West, where space, silence, and independence were limitless.” But soon she realizes the problematic nature of her cowboy metaphor: “That’s the thing about being a cowboy; in order to ride free across all that open range, you have to destroy the life that is already there. There’s great violence required to make a landscape empty.” It is this, plus Hulls emphasizing that her existence is a product of colonialism through her mother and British father, that opens up the possibility of viewing Hulls herself as a contradiction. That is, while she faces anti-Asian racism growing up, Hulls’ existence marks her as an (unwitting) participant of settler colonialism via her presence in America and romanticization of the cowboy. There’s opportunity for Hulls to tie her fascination with the cowboy to American history and Asian American participation in American settler colonialism, but perhaps I’m asking too much of Hulls again, demanding that my own interests in these topics be explored in her memoir.
Overall, like the water Hulls eventually returns to by the end of her novel, Feeding Ghosts is fluid, embracing different forms of storytelling and recognizing that it cannot be solidified into one narrative form. It is thick with trauma and love, and in its density, all it asks is to be held. To be released from its weight, by telling you its story. “Isn’t this, in the end, what this story is about?” Hulls asks us. “The longing to hold. The longing to be held.” To read Feeding Ghosts, then, is to feel its heaviness: to hold it, and to let it hold you.
Janet Song hails from Long Island but tells people she’s from New York. She is pursuing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Southern California.