Graphic novel wins Pulitzer for Chinese American artist/aurthor

Tessa Hulls chronicled her family's mental health journey and immigration journey to the US.

The story of an immigrant family spanning three generations and the journey from China to the US earned a Pulitzer Prize for the author, Chinese American author Tessa Hulls.

In her acclaimed graphic memoir debut, Feeding Ghosts, Hulls traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family.

“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.

The Pulitzer Prize committee called Hulls' work “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.”

 Tessa’s grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival—then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.

Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away. 

It took Huls ten years to write and draw her memoir

“I didn’t feel like I had a choice,” she told Alaska NPR. “My family ghosts literally told me I had to do this.”

She lives in Juneu, Alaska where she works at the state capitol.

Feeding Ghosts is Tessa’s homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.

In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, Feeding Ghosts has received many accolades since its publication, including both the Libby Award for Best Graphic Novel and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, as well as being named a “Best Book of the Year” by Time magazine, NPR, Publishers Weekly and others.

Hull joins another Asian American in winning this year's honor. Susie Ibarra, a Filipino American, also won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her composition Sky Islands, drew inspiration from the Philippines rain forest and mountains.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news, views and chismis from an AANHPI perspective, follow me on Threads, on X or at the blog Views From the Edge.

Asian American journalists win Pulitzer Prizes

On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize Board recognized the work of several Asian American journalists for their reporting in 2020.

The Pulitzer awarded two awards for Explanatory Reporting to Ed Yong of The Atlantic and a team of Reuters journalists that included Andrew Chung. 

The Pulitzer board awarded a prize to The Atlantic's science reporter Yong “for a series of lucid, definitive pieces on the COVID-19 pandemic that anticipated the course of the disease, synthesized the complex challenges the country faced, illuminated the U.S. government’s failures, and provided clear and accessible context for the scientific and human challenges it posed.”

Yong told Poynter in an email, “It’s surreal. I wish that the stories I wrote had never been necessary, but I’m proud to have been able to help my readers make sense of a crisis that often defied sense."

In a tweet, Yong wrote he will be splitting the $15,000 prize money “between everyone who worked on my pieces last year—every editor, copy editor, fact checker, artist, and more. Even when individuals win Pulitzers, their work depends on a community. I want to honor mine.”

A Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting also went to a Reuters team for an exhaustive examination, powered by a pioneering data analysis of U.S. federal court cases, of the obscure legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” and how it shields police who use excessive force from prosecution.

One member of the Reuters crew includes Andrew Chung, a correspondent at Reuters covering the Supreme Court and related issues. Andrew joined Reuters in 2014 after more than a decade at the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, where he reported both domestically and internationally and was most recently the Quebec Bureau Chief.

The Pulitzer for International Reporting went to a Buzzfeed team that includes Indian American journalist Megha Rajagopaian.

They won for a series of clear and compelling stories that used satellite imagery and architectural expertise, as well as interviews with two dozen former prisoners, to identify a vast new infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims.

Rajagopalan is an award-winning international correspondent for BuzzFeed News, based in London. She has been a staff correspondent for BuzzFeed News based in China and Thailand as well as in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and before that she was a political correspondent for Reuters in China. She has reported from 23 countries in Asia and the Middle East on stories ranging from the North Korean nuclear crisis to the peace process in Afghanistan. Her work has been translated into 7 languages, been taught in classrooms at Columbia and NYU, and was anthologized in 2018's What Future: The Year's Best Writing on What's Next for People, Technology, and the Planet.