Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls
Intergenerational trauma has caught on as a way to describe how past injuries are carried into present-day lives. They are like ghosts, figments of history that haunt us today.
Tessa Hulls explores her own family’s intergenerational trauma with Feeding Ghosts. Her grandmother was a Shanghai journalist when the city fell to Chinese Communists in 1949. She escaped with her daughter, eventually arriving in California but unable to escape the trauma of a brutal revolutionary war and exile in a strange land.
By her account, Tessa was rebellious and “retreated into the feral romance of the Wild West, where space, silence, and independence were limitless.” Neither her nor her mom could see that their conflict grew from “the cultural systems that had shaped us.” It took several years of travel adventure for Tessa to realize that the unresolved past will follow her to the ends of the Earth—and that the lonesome cowboy life is just another escape mechanism poorly designed for facing reality. Drawn in black and white, Feeding Ghosts’ pages are crowded with pictures and words too weighty for tiny thought bubbles. Hulls helpfully includes a two-page “highly abbreviated timeline” locating her family in China’s troubled history.
Get Feeding Ghosts at Amazon here.
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