In 'Feeding Ghosts,' Tessa Hulls explores impact of China's Cultural Revolution on her family

Editor's note: This segment was rebroadcast on Aug. 7, 2024, and May 19, 2025.

In her graphic memoir "Feeding Ghosts," Tessa Hulls explores the impact of China's Cultural Revolution on three generations of her family.

The artist and author's grandmother and mother were refugees from Communist China. Her grandmother, a dissident journalist, had repeated mental breakdowns, which caused Hulls' mother to become a caretaker at a very young age.

In "Feeding Ghosts," Hulls tells their stories as well as her own. The book is her attempt to face a negative force “devouring” her family, she says.

“To me, these ghosts were the unfaced past that lived within my family,” she says. “I felt like my role as an author and as an artist was to give them nourishment by bearing witness and listening to this story and finding out what it was that they had to say.”

By Tessa Hulls 

Excerpted with permission of publisher MCD Books.