Our past is full of ghosts.
By doing so, I don’t just mean the ghosts of people, whether you believe in literal ghosts, whether you believe in people, places, and lasting impressions of those, places, and things that have disappeared from our lives. Ideas for what we were and even who we were at a particular time. Humans are rather complex beings, consisting of the experiences and the overall fun of the labels that form our identity. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes confused and contradictory.
How we deal with ghosts helps define who we are today. And of those who we want to be in the future. And it serves as part of the Eisner winner’s framework for the Best Graphic Memoirs of the Year.
“I didn’t know how to reconcile my grandmother’s past stories with the 90-pound Spectre who shuffled around our home in Grey Costco sweatpants.”
Feeding Tessa Hals is a story of her troubled past. Her grandmother, mother, and ultimately discover her own story through the lens of China under the rapid change, colony Hong Kong and, finally, America. of conflict between competing identities and understanding. And finding spaces between them to adjust them.
The idea of the Hungry Ghost Southeast Asian is presented quite early in the story. As an unfinished concept before someone is not satisfied or leaving things unfinished. The ghost here was the first ghost of Hals’ grandmother, San Yi, but in a broader sense, the hull’s own identity as an Asian American. Being in a kind of marginal space is broached as complex rather than Chinese, and neither of them is American. And it causes her to find the truth about her grandmother’s memoir, a flight from her Chinese home, and a descent into what appears to be a paranoid schizophrenia. The trauma that caused it. The ghost of this mental illness also spills further into the hull relationship with his mother, and traces more history through Hong Kong. And it’s quite profound, but very accurate, and presents the unveiling of the language as a barrier. Even when speaking the same language, perspective and dialect can mean that it is very different.
Hals presents this story as if he were to tell the story himself. Her grandmother’s book, the dialogue between herself and her mother, various literary works she mentions, and some fragments of maps. Her art style is simple cartoons, but her location has quite a bit of detail, and there is unforgettable complexity in what she calls her mother’s ghost twins. A cold mask embraced in the darkness. This is one of the dualities she works to reconcile through this discovery trip.
“Because of their terrible powers, our ghosts were unable to carry themselves out of the darkness.”
Hals also received a Pulitzer Prize for Memoirs or Autobiography for Farming Ghosts. It’s easy to see why it got the praise it gave. The work presents a complex combination of travel, self-discovery and history through the unique perspectives of three women. It was presented in a fascinating, simple art style. Even on the map and timeline. It gives a spin on the rise of communist China and gives a deep division in Western and Eastern attitudes to deal with mental illness.
And hopefully, after the act of creation, discovery, the ghost of the hull is no longer hungry.
Classic comics big summary: feeding ghosts
Nourishing
Author & Artist: Tessa Harz
Publisher: MCD | Farrar, Strauss, Giroux
Release date: March 6, 2024
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