Feeding Ghosts, Tessa Hulls

I loved the mass and heft of this book — square, fat, heavy, thick paper densely covered in swirls of black ink. It feels like the labor of love that it clearly is — a memoir, a family history, and an often arduous effort to understand and connect to a complicated past.

Tessa Hulls’ grandmother was a journalist who fled Shanghai for Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution with her daughter, penned a somewhat scandalous blockbuster memoir, and sank into mental illness. One strand of the book, then, is to conjure a sense of this bold, tenacious woman, who Tessa knows as a disoriented elderly who spends her days manically filling notebooks. To understand her grandmother’s trajectory also requires an account of Chinese history, particularly its more harrowing episodes — the book taught me a lot that I didn’t know before.

A second strand of the book considers the story of Tessa’s mother, who grew up in an elite boarding school in Hong Kong, seeing her mother only occasionally. Part of what fascinates Tessa is the realization that in Hong Kong, her mother’s mixed race identity had a clear cultural meaning, a link to a community. This contrasts sharply with Tessa’s experience as an Asian American who often feels ambiguous, illegible, caught in between. But more centrally, Tessa also tries to sort through the layers of her own relationship to her mother, and to understand how the friction between them stems both from cultural differences and more individual responses to trauma.

And then, of course, there is Tessa’s account of her own life and its varied twists and turns. Because I first heard about the book via a Reed alumni group (the author and I are both Reedies), I was slightly bummed that she didn’t say more about her college experience. But I was really interested in her trajectory as an artist and writer. And I loved reading about her adventures bartending in Antarctica, and appreciated her meditations on freedom.

This is a hell of a debut — complex, thorny, lyrical. I can’t wait to see what she does next!