Tessa Hulls still doesn’t fully understand why her family chose to move to a tiny town in West Marin. Of all the places, how would two immigrants born in cosmopolitan cities — her father in London and her mother in Shanghai — end up in a place with more cows than people?
“Sometimes I wonder if my parents simply reached the Pacific Ocean and, finding a barrier not easily crossed, stopped,” she writes in her graphic memoir, “Feeding Ghosts.”
“Living in a town without the context or support of an Asian American community, my mother carried her country of origin like a phantom limb,” she continues. “My mom didn’t bring me up to think of myself as being both Chinese and American. Instead, she taught me I was neither.”
Navigating her complex relationship with her mother and her grandmother, who lived with them in West Marin, she found refuge and peace exploring the local trails with a backpack full of books she got from the Point Reyes Library.
When she was able to do so, the multidisciplinary artist, writer and adventurer took off to explore the world: from a 5,000-mile solo bike ride from Southern California to Maine to bartending in Antarctica to painting murals in Ghana. But, when she was around 30 years old, she began to feel that her adventures were becoming more of an escape from the “ghosts” she felt were haunting her — the ones of her family’s history.
After around 10 years of extensive research into Chinese history, as well as her own family’s, an off-the-grid artist residency, trips to Asia and more, she published her first book, “Feeding Ghosts,” in March 2024. Earlier this month, it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, an honor she found out about while working in Alaska as a cook for Alaska Capitol’s cafeteria.
The Pulitzer Prize called it “an affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women — the author, her mother and grandmother, and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories.”
In it, Hulls reflects on her childhood and relationship with her mother and examines the threads of her grandmother’s mental illness and trauma, going back to her days working as a journalist. She gets caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory, flees to Hong Kong with Hulls’ mother, Rose, and goes on to write a bestselling memoir about her experiences, which leads her to have a mental breakdown that she never fully recovers from. But, despite it all, love finds a way into their lives.
“The bulk of my creative work is done when I’m backpacking or I’m riding my bike,” said Tessa Hulls of her creative process. (Photo by Rie Sawada)After winning a Pulitzer Prize, Hulls took the time to speak about her time in West Marin, her artistic practice and “Feeding Ghosts.”
Q You recently said one of the emotions you felt after finding out you won was relief. Why is that?
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Q How did you get into the culinary world, and how has it inspired your art and other creative practices?
A I fell into it by accident when I was playing rugby in college. I ended up with a really nontraditional cooking background and learned that you could take seasonal contracts in remote places with it. For me, it’s always been the skill set that I use to be able to have access to amazing wild places.
I think that being a cook and being a painter, which was my main medium, are really the same thing because it’s about taking a limited palette and balancing and layering to create something that’s entwined. At times when I felt burned out on the creative side of my career, having these seasons where I would just make food was really restorative, and I think it really helped me have a sense of longevity and play.
Q You speak about starting this book in part due to a sense of duty. How did it feel when this chapter came to a close?
A I felt free the instant I started my book tour and it got to be about connecting with other people and being in community again. I think the reason it was so hard for me was because of how isolated it was. And once I started being able to do the part that brought me back into the fabric of other human lives, I felt in a really visceral way that something had been healed.
Q You’ve said this is your first and only book. Do you feel like you’ve explored this medium as much as you can?
A Absolutely. Someone up here in Alaska came up to me at my paperback release event and told me about the first person who ever won the Iditarod the first year that they held it. After he won, he never participated in the race again. Somebody asked him, “Why did you never race again?” And he just smiled and said, “Because I won.”
Q When did your love of art begin?
A I was one of those kids who, just from day one, was an artist. Calvin and Hobbes was the first creative work I ever loved. When asked, “Who’s your favorite artist?” I always say Bill Watterson. That remains true for me.
I’m still really close friends with my high school art teacher, Martha Cederstrom. She’s one of my adoptive mothers. At then-Drake High School, she identified that what I most needed was an adult figure in my life who would give me space. She let me make myself a little nook in the corner of the art room that was my space, and it really gave me something that I desperately needed.
Q Did working on this book shed a different light on growing up in West Marin?
A Definitely. I don’t think I understood how profoundly spoiled I was in terms of wilderness access until I moved to other places. When I come back to Marin, the first thing I do is hit the trails. A good friend of mine, who grew up in India, was recently a writer-in-residence at Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes Station. I was talking to her about what that experience was like, and she said, “I would have been able to hear myself so much more clearly if I had grown up somewhere with this much space.” That really resonated. I think the gift that my childhood gave me is a profound comfort with silence and the ability to listen to what emerges in it.
Q Are the outdoors a place for peace or adventure or a little bit of both?
A It’s definitely both. I think I’m somebody who thinks best in silence and motion. The bulk of my creative work is done when I’m backpacking or I’m riding my bike a couple thousand miles because it’s doing all of the internal work to understand what I’m trying to make so that by the time I get into the studio, I’ve organized it within my mind and my body. It’s a really integral part of how I create.
Q While doing your research, you discovered a great-grandparent was a painter. Did that help you connect to your family in a different way?
A Definitely. I think I’m somebody who tends to intellectualize and hide behind thinking. When I would have those parallels in my family and our past, it would help me connect emotionally in a way that I didn’t necessarily know how to find.
Q You write about your mom’s fear around your artistic traits, that you might become your grandmother. What was it like to feel that about something you loved doing?
A At the time, I really didn’t understand what was happening, and that was part of why I had to leave. I felt that fear, but I couldn’t name it and, therefore, couldn’t overcome it because it was too all-consuming and too in the ether. That time away was really crucial because it’s what helped me understand what was going on.
I think that’s what the book did: It made my mom see how afraid she had been and the damage that fear had caused. And I think now, in the way the book has been received, it’s actually added another layer of healing because I think my mom understands how strong this need and this capacity always was in me.
Q How has this book shaped you?
A It’s given me a sense of permission to live my 40s more in tune with my desires rather than my duties. Prior to when I started this book, I knew that there was a duty that I was running from. And now it feels like I’ve carried a necessary act to completion. And the gift of that is I’m free of my ghosts, and I get to make a different set of choices with how I move through the world.
I’m returning to this idea of wanting to be in the wilderness and have these adventures but do it in a way that feels like it’s being of service that is connected to other people. I don’t know specifically what it is, but it feels like I’m headed in the right direction, and there’s nothing I love more than an unknown horizon.
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