SEATTLE — A Seattle-based author got the news she won a Pulitzer Prize while working as an itinerate sous chef for the Alaska State legislature.
Her book is the second graphic memoir to snag the nation’s biggest journalism prize.
Tessa Hulls’ debut memoir has been racking up accolades and awards since it came out in 2024.
The book explores the effect of China’s traumatic history on her grandmother, her mother, and herself.
“It was right before lunchtime,” remembered Hulls, laughing. “And then all of the senators and representatives came in. And so, I just had to keep making food. And that’s how I found out.”
“No, no,” she said. “I mean, it was one of the more surreal experiences of my life... and I’ve had a strange life.”
Hulls captures that “strange life” in “Feeding Ghosts,” her graphic memoir about trauma passed through the generations.
“It’s using the life story of my grandmother, Sun Yi, who was a journalist in Shanghai,” said Hulls. “And it’s taking what happened to her after Mao [Zedong] and the Communists came to power, and using the scaffolding of her life to teach about a century of really dark Chinese history that is not broadly known in the United States.”
It was in Seattle that Hulls says she found a space and a community to finally tell her family’s story. She spent nine long years writing and drawing in the historic Inscape Building adjacent to Seattle’s Chinatown-International District, often seeking refuge in the Danny Woo Community Garden.
So, she was asked, is there a part of Seattle in the book?
“Oh yeah, I mean, there’s probably Easter eggs,” Hulls said. “I hid lots of things in there. Like I put my Crocs in as many times as possible, just as, like, a joke to myself. And, you know, I drew, I have these little dinosaur-shaped paintbrush holders. So yeah, there’s little easter eggs of my life and thus Seattle in the book.”
Hulls’ grandmother died 13 years ago.
“My mom finally, after 13 years, decided she was ready to let go of the ghost of her mother and scatter her ashes,” she said. “And my mom scattered her mother’s ashes in a river and said goodbye to her in Shanghainese, which was her native language, and gave her an offering of food. And the next day I won a Pulitzer Prize.”
The impact of winning the Pulitzer Prize is already being felt by Tessa Hulls. This book was really hard to find in Seattle. KIRO 7 finally found it at Third Place Books. The prize is so new, that it doesn’t even say it on the cover yet.
Still, Hulls says getting here was no easy task.
“It was really, really hard,” she said. “And I think I don’t have something like that in me again. And I’m fine with that.”
One — a Pulitzer Prize — and done? she was asked.
"Yup!” she responded.
Hulls has a home in Seattle, but she says she enjoys short-term gigs elsewhere. Later this summer, she’ll be cooking for a paleontology dig in Utah.
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