Hungry ghosts in Chinese culture are “where the spirits of people who did not accomplish what they needed to on Earth are doomed to eternally roam the planet with an insatiable appetite,” Tessa Hulls writes.
She describes in graphic terms how she felt those ghosts and tried to outrun them as a child. But no longer — and not because her book tracing the historical and spiritual paths of her grandmother, mother and herself just won the Pulitzer Prize.
“I did this because I was trying to heal my relationship with my mother and that happened, so I got the impossible,” Hulls said on Monday, a few hours after learning her book “Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir” won the Pulitzer in the Memoir or Autobiography category. “And I think in a way it’s actually been a really emotionally healthy way to navigate the critical reception because that’s not why I did this. I did this because my family ghosts needed me to.”
Hulls, who moved to Juneau at the end of 2024, spent nearly a decade on the 400-page memoir that traces back to her grandmother Sun Yi, including her travails as a journalist during the Communist takeover in China in 1949, a year before giving birth to Hulls’ mother Rose. They fled hardships and repression to Hong Kong when Rose was 7, with Sun Yi writing her own bestselling memoir while also suffering a mental breakdown that affected her for life.
Rose eventually entered the United States on a scholarship and brought her mother to live with her — resulting in difficult experiences that caused Hulls to leave home for far-away destinations that included working in Antarctica as a cook. But a decade ago she returned to confront her family’s ghosts.
Hulls said she traveled with her mother through China and Hong Kong — the graphic memoir opens with scenes of them discussing past history on a train ride — which was part of the healing in their relationship.
“I think all she ever wanted was for me to want to understand her story,” Hulls said. “So I kind of got a unicorn in that I had an immigrant mother who actually wanted to talk about the past. I think it was two steps forward (and) one step back, because I don’t think she necessarily understood how emotionally revealing it was going to end up being. But I think growing up in my family, watching what happened to my grandmother after the Communist revolution — seeing what that secrecy and the control of information did to her — I think it’s made me somebody who’s really inclined to err on the side of transparency.”
Macmillan Publishers The cover of Tessa Hulls’ “Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir.”
The opening train journey is followed by an illustrative look at Hulls’ departure and return from her family home, serving as something of a prelude where she invokes the cultural meaning of “hungry ghosts” in explaining the full tale about to be told.
“It tells my story the only way it can be told: as part of an entwined trinity in which my mom, my grandma and I blur together against a backdrop of Chinese history and diaspora,” she writes a couple of pages later. “I began with an intimate question: what broke my family? But that question led me to see how bonds shatter across time…how my grandma’s fractured mind was a reflection of her fractured country, and how our cracked hearts all bled from that same seam.”
In addition to the Pulitzer, “Feeding Ghosts” was named the winner of the National Books Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, 2025 Anisfield Wolf Prize and the Libby Award for best graphic novel. It has gotten similar laudatory notice in reviews.
“Even though Feeding Ghosts represents her first foray into the genre, the 400-page odyssey holds its own in the company of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, or any of the other major comic works that feature immigrants, the children of immigrants, and refugees processing the generational traumas sparked by the horrors, bloodshed, and diasporas of the 20th century,” the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger notes in a review published April 23, 2024.
Hulls said while art and storytelling are lifelong interests, and she’s been an adventurer at many things in many places over the years, “I think making this book was the most lonely thing I’ve ever done.”
“It was really challenging because I drew and wrote the bulk of it during the depths of COVID, so without a lot of the usual support structures,” she said. “And the point at which I started to be able to believe that there was a reason that I had done this is when people started contacting me (after publication) saying ‘this is my family history, too.’ And really coming to appreciate that there are so many millions of people who were shaped by the same convulsions of Chinese history, it made me understand that in trying to get to a place where I understood the story I was doing it collectively even though I wasn’t aware of it.”
Courtesy of Tessa Hulls A sample from Tessa Hulls’ “Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir.”
While writing “Feeding Ghosts” might have been a lonely experience, the hours after she won a Pulitzer for it definitely were not. She said she found out while working at her kitchen job in the legislative lounge at the Alaska State Capitol.
“I was at work and my phone was blowing up, and I didn’t know why, and then actually one of the representatives told me,” she said. “I had to continue making food while trying to process that.”
Of all the awards the book has won, the Pulitzer is the pinnacle, Hulls said.
“I mean, my mind is blown,” she said. “This still is not sinking in at all.”
In addition to getting plenty of kudos from state lawmakers and others at the Capitol, Hulls is likely to get plenty more attention than originally planned during a paperback release party for “Feeding Ghosts” scheduled at 5:30 p.m. at Alaska Robotics. Meanwhile, she said she still has to worry about everyday tasks including pet-sitting duties and self-catering for the release party.
“I was going to go prep a bunch of stuff for hot pot,” she said when asked if her post-work plans include a celebration.
Hulls also said that despite winning a Pulitzer for her debut graphic memoir, she is vowing there will not be a second such book.
“I have always been a multidisciplinary artist and, for me, moving between genres and letting every story that I work on dictate the forum it wants to emerge in is integral to the process,” she said. “And I’m somebody who, for better or for worse, I only do things in all-consuming sprints, which is why seasonal work is great for me. But having to spend multiple years in the same story with something that had to remain static and not change, it was too isolating. It really took me out of the world, and it clarified for me that I want to be the kind of artist and writer who’s directly engaging with the world and working with other people, and that is not what a book is.”
Part of the reason Hulls said she moved to Alaska is to pursue some of her future projects.
“I’m really interested in combining my wilderness and my creative lives because those have sort of been like my two great passions,” she said. “And what I’m really interested in doing is partnering with scientists and nonprofits and Indigenous organizations that are doing work around ecological resilience and climate change in remote places, and establish long-term working relationships where I can basically be a comics journalist doing a really niche role of science communication for them — talking about what they’re doing and why it matters, and sort of tying it into the big picture. So it’s not that I’m not going to make any more (illustrative works) — I’m just not making another book.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or 907-957-2306.
