Country Bookshelf Presents: Tessa Hulls in conversation with Jamie Ford

Location: 28 W Main St

Address: 28 West Main Street, Bozeman, MT 59715

Date: 7 Apr

Join Country Bookshelf in welcoming Tessa Hulls and Jamie Ford for a conversation about Hulls' graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts.

Please contact [email protected] if you have any accessibilty concerns

Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir is artist, writer, and adventurer Tessa Hulls’ homecoming, a vivid, genre-defying journey into the heart of one family set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. “I grew up in a house choked by ghosts, with my grandmother Sun Yi at the center of a darkness that was felt but never named,” Hulls writes. In an evocative tour de force debut, Feeding Ghosts tells the extraordinary story of three generations of women: Tessa; her mother, Rose; and her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi.

Once a brave and brilliant young journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the Communist revolution, Sun Yi fled China for Hong Kong, wrote a bestselling memoir, and then promptly lost her mind. That long-lost memoir, Eight Years in Red Shanghai: Love, Starvation, Persecution, becomes a catalyst in Tessa’s search for her family’s history, providing pieces to the puzzle trapped in Sun Yi’s past.

Feeding Ghosts weaves Sun Yi’s story with that of her daughter and granddaughter. Shadowing the damage inflicted by her mother’s ghosts, Rose contains both an overbearing need to shield Tessa from the world and a cold underside that leaves her daughter feeling abandoned. To escape her mother’s smothering fear, Tessa leaves home and travels to the farthest, most remote corners of the globe. But a few months after her thirtieth birthday, Tessa’s roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away, and she becomes obsessed with a desire to unravel her family’s complicated history.

She learns that Sun Yi’s resistance against Communist control dovetailed with her affair with a Swiss diplomat who swiftly departed China after impregnating her, and the government’s subsequent brainwashing, brutality, and endless surveillance sent Sun Yi into a devastating spiral of mental illness from which she never recovered: “My grandmother’s body escaped China, but her mind did not. And her adult life was spent as little more than a shell to hold her ghosts.”

Extensively researched and gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts explores what it means to be the daughter of immigrants, forced to bear witness as the first generation in a new land. It is a book about mothers and daughters, mental illness, inherited trauma, Chinese history, and more. At once heartbreaking, inventive, and poignant, Feeding Ghosts exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.

Author Bio:

Tessa Hulls is an artist, a writer, and an adventurer. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Adventure Journal, and her comics have been published in The Rumpus, City Arts, and Spark. She has received grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, 4Culture, and the McMillen Foundation, and she is a recipient of the Washington Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award. Feeding Ghosts is her first book.

Supporting Author Bio:

Jamie Ford is the author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which spent two-and-a-half years on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. This historical, multi-cultural tale has been optioned for a stage musical, and is now read widely in hundreds of schools nationwide. His other bestselling novels include Songs of Willow Frost, and more recently, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, which was published in August 2022 and has been optioned by Jenna Bush Hager’s production company, Thousand Voices.