In 'Feeding Ghosts,' author, illustrator Tessa Hull recounts a healing journey across generations

On paper, Tessa Hulls draws comics, but it’s so much more than that.

Her work has documented protests, neighborhood histories, and artists in Seattle.

She’s become a journalist and historian.

Hulls honed those skills on a project she started nearly a decade ago: telling her own family’s story.

That project is now finished. It’s a book titled "Feeding Ghosts," and, in it, Hulls traces her maternal lineage across three generations, each haunted by the tragedies of the past.

The story starts with her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi, a journalist and author who fled Shanghai after the Communist Revolution.

Then, to her mother Rose, the daughter of a Swiss diplomat, essentially raised in a Hong Kong boarding school after her mother was institutionalized.

And finally to Hulls herself, who is trying to bring peace to her family ghosts.

In order to write this story, Hulls learned Mandarin, took multiple trips to Hong Kong and Shanghai, and tracked down a book written by her grandmother.

Hulls approached the story "determined to only write about dry history." She didn't want to be a character in the book.

Hulls covered the Communist Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, what happened during the Cultural Revolution, but soon realized she couldn't shy away from her own place in the story.

"The further I got into the story, the more I realized that, to be honest to the complexity of what I was encountering, I was going to have to really explore the ways that I had come to armor myself, and basically hide from my emotions," Hulls said, "and enter the same isolation that my grandma and mother had endured because of trauma."

Tessa Hulls will be at Town Hall Seattle at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 6.

Listen to Soundside’s full conversation with Tessa Hulls by clicking the play icon at the top of this story