Feeding Ghosts by Tess Hulls

This is a graphic memoir that is the author's family story. She is feeding their ghosts by pulling them into the light, which she does metaphorically with her words and graphically with the accompanying drawings. She is also feeding her own ghosts, having grown up in a home with generational trauma that she is seeking to disect and understand herself. The story covers three generations of women, starting with her grandmother, Sun Yi, who herself was once a bestselling author of a memoir. Sun Yi’s path wades through a treacherous Chinese history, from the brutal massacre of Chinese in Nanking by Japanese soldiers through her escape to Hong Kong in 1957 — just missing the Great Leap Forward and the mass starvation that came with it. Then, as Sun Yi withdraws into a spiral of hospitalizations and mental illness. the story picks up through Sun Yi’s daughter, Rose, who is unbearably aloof and seemingly cruel at times to the author herself, Rose’s daughter, as she pieces together their past to make better sense of the reverberating wounds that have threatened to drown each of them in matrilineal succession. The graphics are on the simple side— cartoons drawn with black strokes on white paper — but what it conveys is so much more intricate. Panels often bleed into one another, allowing for layered illustrations rich in metaphor. She visually represents trauma as ghosts in her bones, emanating from her, her mother and her grandmother, often intermingling like smoke; veins of their shared history branching out from their bodies as a physical representation of their emotional interconnectivity. It is a bit wordy as grphic novels go, but it conveys a time in hisotry through the eyes of one family's story.