'Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir' (2023).
Tessa Hulls is an American journalist, painter, illustrator, editor, cook and educator. Early in her career, she drew short journalistic reports in comic format. In 2023, she released her first graphic novel, 'Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir', which made her the second comic book artist (and first female one) to receive a Pulitzer Prize (2025). 'Feeding Ghosts' chronicles the lives of Hulls' grandmother and mother, who were both born and raised in China, before moving to the United States. The work unravels the roots of her grandmother's mental problems that also kept Hulls' mother and herself in an anxious stronghold. The family saga is told against the backdrop of China's transition from a nationalist republic into a Maoist state, while also focusing on the immigrant experience in the USA and exploring themes like identity, roots and madness. Hulls reflects on her strained relationship with her mother, her own fugitive travelling behavior and their eventual reconciliation.
Early life and family background
Tessa Hulls was born in 1984 in a small town near the coast of Northern California. At her mother's request, she hasn't made the town name public. Hulls' father was a British immigrant, and her mother Rose of Chinese origins. Hulls' maternal grandmother, Sun-Yi, also lived with them, because she was bipolar and needed a lot of attention, especially since she had been institutionalized before. As the only Asians in their small town, Hulls' family stood out. Many people were confused that her father was a white Englishman, while the rest of her relatives were Chinese Asians and Hulls herself a "white-looking" multiracial person, who couldn't even speak Chinese. Since Rose never explained much about their years in China, nor about her grandmother's mental problems, it left Tessa Hulls confused. She wasn't even informed that they still had relatives in China. And since she wasn't taught Chinese, she couldn't properly communicate with her grandmother.
'Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir' (2023).
Mother Rose often romanticized the China that she had left behind, while Hulls had no connection to this ideal. Rose devoted so much attention to Sun-Yi that Hulls often felt ignored. On the opposite end, Rose was very concerned that her daughter might end up bipolar too. Her constant advice, warnings and insistence to read or follow therapy, only gave Hulls the feeling something was "wrong" with her and pushed her further away from her mother. Since she was raised in a different culture, Rose could be emotionally very inward and overly rational, and couldn't understand that her daughter's craving for independence is a natural phase in the life of any young adult. In her mind, her child was indeed going insane.
Since the family didn't own a TV, but lived close to nature, Tessa Hulls often played outside and enjoyed roaming the woods. Another form of escapism was reading. The local library owned numerous novels and non-fiction books that offered her a window to other worlds. Her favorite comics were Hergé's 'Tintin', Albert Uderzo's 'Astérix', Alfred Bestall's run on 'Rupert Bear' and especially Bill Watterson's 'Calvin & Hobbes'. As a child, Hulls often redrew her favorite 'Calvin & Hobbes' panels in her sketchbooks. In an article for The Project Room's Literary Journal (8 May 2013), she elaborated: "I didn't understand the nuances of 'Calvin and Hobbes' when I first began reading it, but rather saw my own experiences and passions mirrored in Calvin's curiosity, independence, and stubborn refusal to conform to external expectations." When Watterson discontinued the series in 1995, she was 11 and remembered crying over it. Hulls cut out the final episode from the paper and kept it on her wall, above her drawing table. As she grew older, she appreciated 'Calvin & Hobbes' on a deeper level. Interviewed by Michelle Kicherer (wweek.com, 28 February 2024), Hulls added: "I loved the idea that you could use a simple narrative to talk about some of the most fraught existential questions." At age 18, she had a 'Calvin & Hobbes' image tattooed on her leg.
In 2007, Hulls graduated from college.
From Hulls' comic travel diary.
Travelling and wandering years
As a teenager, Tessa Hulls became a proverbial rolling stone. She started making long bike trips in and around her town. Although she had a steady relationship at one point, and was even engaged, she soon felt trapped into a sedentary lifestyle. Eventually, she and her boyfriend decided to break up and she started travelling, rarely staying in one place for long. In 2011, for instance, she biked more than 5,000 miles, all the way from Southern California to the opposite end of the country, Maine, New England. The trip took her four months. Over the years, Hulls literally travelled to every continent, from Antarctica (2011) to Ghana, Africa (2014). During her voyages, she took seasonal jobs, like conducting journalistic research for The Washington Post and Atlas Obscura, as well as curating art exhibitions at the Henry Art Gallery, The Seattle Art Museum, The Washington Ensemble Theater and Microsoft Research. She sometimes cooked for small residential communities through temporary contracts. If she couldn't afford a hotel, or find someone to give her a resting place for the night, she camped outside. Since the mid-2020s, Hulls has divided her time between living in Juneau, Alaska, and Seattle, Washington. Despite not being wealthy and having no standard sedentary life, she enjoys her freedom to go anywhere and do what she wants.
Hulls has sometimes expressed regret that so many people don't have the opportunity to travel the world. Some communities have lived in the same location for generations, without having much contact with the outside world. Even travelling in the United States, Hulls observed that many towns and cities are visibly divided by race, class and gender. Countries are therefore not as "united" as patriotic propaganda tends to believe. Travelling gave her a more nuanced perspective on people and why they can have different viewpoints, even within the same neighborhood. Interviewed on the Folkstories podcast (15 February 2019), Hulls told an anecdote on how she once stayed over at a fire station in Alabama. During her conversation with one of the firemen, she mentioned her Chinese background and he said: "Your father was smart to find a submissive Asian woman. I would want one of those, myself." While Hulls could have condemned the man for this offensive remark, she didn't, because this very same man had proven his hospitality by giving her a meal and a place to stay for the night. In short, "Travelling made me realize it's difficult to hate people up close."
Hulls prefers to travel alone, although she is often discouraged that this is "far too dangerous" for a "vulnerable woman like her." Despite people's concerns, she has discovered many examples of other female explorers and adventurers, like Bessie Coleman, Fannie Quigley, Ada Blackjack, Annie Londonderry, Fanny Bullock Workman, and other strong, independent women, like strongwoman/circus performer Katie Sandwina. Hulls did research on these individuals and devoted a lecture to them, titled 'She Traveled Solo: Strong Women of the Early 20th Century'. In general, Tessa Hulls values solitude, because it helps her collect her thoughts and provides her with inspiration for her work.
Comic journal made in Antarctica.
Illustrations and comics
In 2011, Hulls spent a few months in Antarctica, working as a cook in a research station. Interviewed by Amaris Ketcham and Nora Hickey for Autobiographix (7 February 2024), she recalled that "there wasn't a huge amount of room for creative work. I lived in a room with five other people, and because some of them worked the night shift, the lights had to be kept off for sleep schedules. So I made a little light-tight art studio under my bed, and when I found myself needing a quick way to capture the feeling of my environment - I started drawing comics." She drew a graphic journal of her time on the South Pole and also visualized her bike travels from South California to Maine into a comic strip.
Hulls has frequently made graphic journals, reflecting on personal anecdotes and travel impressions in comic strip format. In 2016, a fire broke out in a warehouse in Oakland, California, named "The Ghost Ship". The location was used as a squatter's place for an artist collective that, at the time of the disaster, held a concert there. 36 people died in the flames, among them 33-year old DJ Cherushii (pseudonym of Chelsea Faith Dolan), who was a high school friend of Hulls. Hulls happened to be in Hong Kong when the news reached her and so she couldn't attend her funeral. Already feeling isolated in a foreign city, she felt even more alone. She found solace in re-reading a book Chelsea had once recommended to her: Banana Yoshimoto's 'Kitchen'. Hulls didn't have a copy with her, but the Hong Kong library did. Because of the lack of a library card, she couldn't borrow it and therefore read it cover to cover in their hall. Hulls expressed her grief in a four-page comic dedicated to her late friend.
Comic reflecting on the death of the artist's friend Chelsea.
In 2015, Hulls contributed a biweekly comic strip to The Capitol Hill Times, interviewing people who have intriguing "double lives" next to their normal 9 to 5 jobs. In 2018, Hulls also drew a comic titled 'Walking the Length of Our Rage', describing how her perception of anger changed after reading Lucy Lippard's 'Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory'. In the summer of 2020, she was in Washington D.C., near Capitol Hill, spending three weeks in an arts non-profit conference room. At the time, huge demonstrations broke out as a result of the George Floyd case. Floyd was an African-American man who had been a victim of police brutality and died as a result. Hulls followed the protests up close, interviewing many people and then adapting everything in comic strip format.
In 2021, she made a comic titled 'The History of the Bicycle as a Tool for Social Change', looking at 19th-century and early 20th-century women who were notable bikers, like Alice Austen, Amelia Bloomer, Hélène Dutrieu, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Annie Londonderry, Elizabeth Pennell, Billie Samuel, Maria Ward, Frances Willard, Ginny Hill Wood and Fanny Buller Workman. In Hulls' observation, bicycles became a vehicle for young women to lead a more independent life, despite criticism from other people.
'Walking The Length Of Our Rage', comic journalistic report for City Arts Magazine, 2018.
Hulls has held lectures about a variety of topics, visualizing them with a combination of comics, illustrated handwriting and picture stories. When she speaks in front of an audience, panels from her comics accompany her on Powerpoint slides. Interviewed on santcruzmah.org, Hulls explained her creative process. To gain inspiration, she prefers to go out for a trip rather than scrutinize other people's works, because "it can prevent you from looking at the big picture." To avoid writers' block or creative sterility, she advises to randomly pick out books from the library, or just start working in a different art form for a while: "We have this tendency to keep ourselves focused and on task, but things get the most interesting - and weird - when you roam. (…) By shifting mediums, you get to operate by a "different set of rules". This re-adjustment frees you from the confines of your original medium, gives you permission to try something new, and might just unblock you from what was holding you back in the first place." She also added that it's natural that sometimes, you just have periods that you have no inspiration. She insists that is necessary at times: "It's natural to have fallow periods and not freak out about it. If you have a growing season throughout the year, there has to be a period where the soil renews itself."
Feeding Ghosts
In 2014, Tess Hulls was travelling through Mexico, but missed the excitement of what, in previous circumstances, would have been an exotic journey. The now 30-year old woman had a moment of clarity and self-awareness. She realized that the last decade-and-a-half, she had mostly been running away from her troubled family background, rather than face it. Now mentally ready, she decided to return to her mother and reconcile with her.
As Hulls and her mother talked, she learned more about why they immigrated to the USA. Her now deceased grandmother, Sun Yi (1927-2012), was actually once a best-seller author. During the Chinese-Japanese War (1939-1945), she worked as a journalist in Shanghai. After having an affair with a Swiss diplomat, she became pregnant with Hulls' mother Rose. When Mao took power in 1949, changing China into a Communist state, the diplomat fled the country, leaving his partner and child on their own. But Sun-Yi also wanted to stay in China under the belief that her life wouldn't change much. Instead, the country was ravaged by famine and persecutions of "enemies of the state". Since Sun-Yi had close contacts with officials from the previous regime, some very intimate, she was held under close surveillance and harassment. In 1957, Sun Yi and Rose were smuggled to Hong Kong in secret, since they only had an exit permit, not an entry one. Back then, Hong Kong was a British dominion and so free from Maoist rule. Here Sun Yi published a memoir, 'Eight Years in Red China: Love, Starvation and Persecution' (1958), exposing the brutalities of Mao's regime. Since China was a very isolated country, shielded by Mao's propaganda, the book sold out in no time. It provided Sun Yi with the finances to enter Rose into a boarding school.
'Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir' (2023).
However, afterwards Sun-Yi started experiencing a series of mental breakdowns and in 1961, she was institutionalized. Meanwhile, Rose moved to California through a scholarship, bringing her ailing mother with her, seven years later. In 1980, Rose met her second husband, with whom she had two children, Tessa being the second. Hulls now learned that Rose felt obligated to take care of Sun-Yi. She was so dependent that she panicked whenever Rose wasn't home. To keep her calm, they let her rewrite her memoirs all day, because it gave her a place of mental safety. But Sun-Yi's writing became increasingly more incoherent, scribbling down words sideways and backwards. To give her the illusion that her writing still had meaning, Rose even wrote fake letters from publishers to Sun-Yi.
Now getting a better picture of the events that shaped her grandmother and mother, Hulls wanted to find out more. In 2016, through a grant from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, along with a fellowship from the Robert B. McMillen Foundation, Hulls obtained a copy of her grandmother's memoir and had it translated into English. To fully understand the historical context and linguistic nuances, she also studied Chinese history and language, while travelling to Shanghai and Hong Kong (2016, 2018) with her mother. This marked the first time that Hulls ever met her relatives in China, whose existence had previously been denied to her. She also looked up specific buildings mentioned in Sun-Yi's book and went there to take photos. During her travels, she also kept an illustrated diary, posting episodes on her social media account.
Tessa Hulls decided to pour all her family research into an autobiographical graphic novel. Interviewed by James Brooks for Alaska Beacon (5 May 2025), she reflected: "I felt a huge amount of pressure to try and get it right, because I knew that I would end up speaking for a generation that didn't live through and would come to be seen as an authority on these things." Since she had never worked on such a challenge before, Hulls borrowed several graphic novels from the library, reading them and writing down inspiring graphic and narrative choices. To get a grasp on how their stories were visualized, she also copied some of the images. On a literary level, Hulls singled out Alison Bechdel's 'Fun Home', Marjane Satrapi's 'Persepolis', Craig Thompsons' 'Blankets', David B.'s 'Epileptic' and Thi Bui's 'The Best We Could Do', while admiring the artwork of Mariko Tamaki's 'This One Summer' and Charles Burns' 'Black Hole'.
'Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir' (2023).
Feeling she ought to bring some discipline to her working methods, Hulls arranged a deal with the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. This organization gives aspiring writers the opportunity to live in a grid cabin in the woods of south-western Oregon for a few months. The building in question, nicknamed "Dutch Henry Homestead", is located in the Klamath Mountains, close to the Rogue River. In this rustic, picturesque setting, deep in the wilderness, far from civilization, writers can find the tranquillity they seek. Although the house has certain luxuries, some are dependent on the resident's personal efforts. There is, for instance, no continuous source of electricity. A gasoline generator and small solar electrical panel are available to power a printer or computer. The resident is expected to be self-reliant, though remains in contact through the outside world in case of emergency, like forest fires. In 2019-2020, Hulls spent six and a half months there, receiving even extra unforeseen isolation when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, putting entire civilized areas into quarantaine.
As Hulls described herself, 'Feeding Ghosts', refers to ghosts in Chinese folklore, who are considered "spirits of people who didn't accomplish what they needed to on Earth and are therefore doomed to eternally roam the planet with an insatiable appetite". Her book chronicles her grandmother's life story, but also that of her mother and herself, all against the background of China's turbulent 20th-century history. From this perspective, 'Feeding Ghosts' is comparable to Jung Chang's memoir 'Wild Swans' (1993), about Chang's grandmother, mother and herself in Imperial China, the Chinese Republic and the Communist state. It can also be compared with Amy Tan's semi-autobiographical novel 'The Joy Luck Club' (1993), following a similar theme, but more from a Chinese-American immigrant's point of view.
While reading her grandmother's memoir in preparation for 'Feeding Ghosts', Hulls noticed that Sun-Yi frequently told things that ranged from being dubious or contradictive to objectively false. The "romance" that led to the birth of Rose, for instance, was obviously more a situation where she was taken advantage of and then left behind by a man who didn't want to take responsibility for her child. Sometimes Sun-Yi presented herself as a victim, then as a self-assured schemer, even a seductress. Further complicating the matters were Sun-Yi's delusions after her mental breakdowns. Hulls recalled that her mother often dyed Sun-Yi's hair, because she refused to acknowledge that she was already in her fifties. Hulls unraveled that Sun-Yi had been the subject of "thought reform" and constant government surveillance. Officials interrogated her and forced her for a full week to write and rewrite "confessions" until the Party agreed with "the facts". It made her more paranoid, anxious and slowly but surely, she withdrew into herself. This also explained her later compulsion to constantly pen down her "life story" again.
Since Hulls couldn't always determine the reliability of some of the anecdotes, she made a clear separation between her grandmother's direct quotes and her own interpretations. While Hulls' mother Rose was still alive to be asked questions, it took a long time before she agreed to cooperate, let alone elaborate on the past events. Rose was sometimes agitated that her daughter was only "now" interested in her life story, two years after Sun-Yi had passed away. Her attitude changed when mother and daughter visited China, including her old house, which opened up many repressed memories. In the previously mentioned Alaska Beacon interview, Hulls commented: "I think almost everyone has a complicated relationship with their mother, so that's who my book is for: people with complicated relationships with their mothers. (…) In my case, it was a little bit more concretely tied to specific history, but I think all of us are trying to understand our parents and why they ended up the way that they did."
Indeed, Rose and Tessa Hulls often got blocked by mental, generational and cultural barriers, making it difficult to understand each other's way of thinking and behaving. For instance, during the two years that Sun Yi was hospitalized (1961-1963), Rose claimed to have had no clue where Sun Yi was, only finding out later in a casual conversation with a doctor. Rose sacrificed herself completely to Sun-Yi and her family, even lying to her to maintain her illusions. In Chinese culture, this is valued as an act of family love, but for Hulls it came across as just keeping Sun-Yi caught in a web of harmful lies.
Finally, 'Feeding Ghosts' also reflects on Hulls' own personal experiences. As a multiracial person, she was often the subject of confusion and sometimes derision among fellow Americans, who couldn't quite pigeonhole her. Learning now of her complicated past, she realized both her mother and grandmother were outsiders and misfits in their respective societies too. Her mother, born in China, often claimed she was "more Asian" than her, while in reality, she was multiracial too and thus not viewed as "true Chinese" by some bigoted fellow countrymen. Even more coincidental was the fact that Hulls was 30 when she decided to write her graphic novel, the same age when her grandmother started writing her memoir. Hulls also observed how her grandmother's traumas were passed onto her daughter, who passed them onto her, keeping everyone in a suffocating grip. Hulls now also acknowledged that, no matter how much fun her travels were, there were always moments when she was actually suppressing her guilt for leaving her mother behind and only visiting her once a year. But during the times they were together, they both had trouble expressing their emotions and what they really wanted and expected from one another.
'Feeding Ghosts' (Straus & Giroux, 2023), became a bestseller, won several awards and also praise from veteran comic artist Craig Thompson. Nevertheless, Hulls has publicly announced on her website that she is "completely sure she is never making another book." Interviewed by Mark Sabbatini (Juneau Empire, 5 May 2025), she explained: "(…) 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." Though she did reassure everyone that she would still remain a comics journalist and make illustrative works.
Album cover art by Tessa Hulls.
Graphic contributions
In 2015, Hulls designed the cover of the Smokey Brights seven inch 'No Sheer Force of Will', as well as book covers for the novelists Michelle Peãloza ('Landscape/Heartbreak', Two Sylvias Press, 2015) and Jane Wong ('Over Pour', Action Books, 2016). She also illustrated a summer book bingo event on behalf of the Seattle Arts and Lectures. Hulls has additionally designed posters for biking events.
Recognition
Tessa Hulls received grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and 4 Culture. In 2021, she was honored with the Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award. 'Feeding Ghosts' received the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for "Best First Book", the Libby Award for "Best Graphic Novel", the Kirkus Prize for "Non-Fiction", the Pacific Northwest Book Award and even becoming the first comic artist to receive the Anisfield-Wolf Award for "Best Memoir". In 2025, Hulls' international fame increased when she received the Pulitzer Prize for "Best Graphic Memoir". She was only the second comic artist to be honored with this prestigious award, since Art Spiegelman received "a special Pulitzer" for his graphic novel 'Maus' in 1991. Hulls is also the first female comic artist to receive a Pulitzer Prize.
Self-portrait from 'Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir' (2023), depicting Tessa Hulls identifying with the American archetype of the "wandering cowboy", here striking a pose similar to Clint Eastwood on the film posters of 'The Good, The Bad & The Ugly'.