The Four Color Media Monitor

The Seattle Times interviewed Tessa Hulls, an artist of Chinese descent who's produced a GN titled Feeding Ghosts, which tells her family's history, and of the country itself in the past century:

Seattle artist Tessa Hulls knew she wanted to tell the story of her family history across three generations — she just wasn’t sure what form the story should take.

It’s a complex tale spanning continents, wars and political upheaval: Hulls’ grandmother, Sun Yi, was a pioneering journalist who fled China for Hong Kong after years of persecution from the communist government and published a bestselling memoir.

Sun Yi had an affair with a Swiss diplomat who vanished from her life as soon as she became pregnant with a daughter, whom she named Rose. After Sun Yi had a mental breakdown and was institutionalized, Rose basically raised herself, and that tempestuous childhood would inform the way Rose eventually struggled to protect her daughter, Tessa, from the world.

It’s a multigenerational story packed with drama, intrigue and heartbreak. But if Hulls told it in the form of a traditional prose memoir, she explains over boba tea in the Chinatown International District, her family’s story would have been “so history-heavy that it would’ve been relegated to a pretty academic sphere.”

Publishing “Feeding Ghosts” in comics form, Hulls decided, was “the only way that I could cram in” all the political, historical and emotional layers of her family story “and still keep it pretty accessible.” Through the combination of words and pictures in comics, she explains, “You can shift between the microcosm and the macrocosm so easily and give broad context without needing a lot of exposition.”

But Hulls was a painter and writer whose experience with comics stopped and started with the ones she read as a child like “Calvin and Hobbes” and David Macaulay’s “The Way Things Work.” She needed a crash course. Luckily, Hulls says, “the Seattle [Public] Library has such an awesome graphic novel collection,” and she checked out hundreds of graphic novels and memoirs trying to learn about the form, gravitating especially toward Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” Kristen Radtke’s “Seek You” and David B’s “Epileptic” for inspiration.

When Hulls began the project, she estimated that the graphic memoir would probably “take three to five years to finish.” A born adventurer who has worked for extended stints in Antarctica and Alaska, Hulls spent six months outlining “Feeding Ghosts” while “going feral” in an “experiment with extreme solitude” thanks to The Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, which placed her in “an off-grid cabin in the middle of the wilderness in southern Oregon with no cell service, no internet and no continuous electricity.”

Once she emerged from the wild with a 10,000-word outline, it became clear that the process would take a lot longer than planned. Ultimately, she says writing, illustrating and publishing the 400-page book took “almost a decade. I started it a few months after my 30th birthday and I am now 39.”

Well I'm sure it's well worth the effort. China's communism is a serious issue, much like the Islamic religion is in countries like Iran, which if memory serves, Marjane Satrapi did a GN about, and a subject in serious need of discussion and debate. But if there's something sad coming as a result of Ms. Hulls' new GN, it's this:

Because of her frank discussion of Chinese history, “I think there’s a pretty good chance that mainland China will never give me a visa again,” she says, which means she’s unlikely to ever again see the distant family members she visited for the first time with her mother eight years ago.

Ultimately, though, Hulls feels “a huge sense of relief” that “Feeding Ghosts” is out in the world.

Yes, I do believe it's good if this has gone to press. But she's correct that China's communism remains a serious issue, and hugely regrettable they consider even the remotest criticism objectionable and forbidden. Alas, this is the norm in such totalitarian regimes, which'll take a long time to ever mend.

Labels: Europe and Asia, history, indie publishers, politics