Seattle author Tessa Hulls wins Pulitzer for debut graphic memoir
Seattle-based Chinese American author Tessa Hulls has won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for memoir or autobiography for her graphic memoir 'Feeding Ghosts.'
About Hulls and her book: 'Feeding Ghosts,' which reportedly took Hulls nearly a decade to complete, chronicles three generations of Chinese women in her family, beginning with her grandmother Sun Yi, a persecuted journalist who fled China's communist government with her daughter Rose — Hulls' mother — to Hong Kong. The book details how Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir before suffering a mental breakdown, and examines the trauma passed through generations. The Pulitzer committee described it as 'an affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women.'
'Shocked and grateful': In an Instagram post on Sunday, Hulls said she felt 'shocked and grateful' while acknowledging the emotional toll of creating the work. 'The nine years I spent living within my family's story nearly broke me with their isolation,' she noted. Hulls also reflected on her creative journey through a literary reference, writing, 'When magic dies, it sometimes dies forever; but new and different magic grows when you view what fell as a nurse log, ready to feed new life.'
Hulls, who also recently won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize among other accolades, has stepped back from public life temporarily. 'If you need me, I'll be in the mountains; I'll come back down when I'm ready,' she wrote.
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Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Boston Globe
A professor's hunt for the rarest Chinese typewriter
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Someone at a Chinese Christian church in San Francisco got in touch with him to say they owned a typewriter that they were trying to get rid of. Mullaney took it off their hands. Advertisement The MingKwai is legendary among the handful of people who know about Chinese typewriters. It was invented by Lin Yutang, a Chinese linguist and public intellectual who had begun to worry in the 1930s that without some way to convert ink-brush characters into easily reproduced text, China would be left behind technologically -- perhaps destroyed at the hands of foreign powers. Attempts to create typing machines usually stumbled over the problem of cramming a galaxy of characters into a single machine. Lin's solution was an ingenious system housed in what looked like a large Western typewriter. But when you tapped the keys, something remarkable happened. Any two keystrokes, representing pieces of characters, moved gears within the machine. 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After a few frantic hours, he got a reply, and the next day he and the Felixes were on the phone. He told them the MingKwai's story. He said that while it was up to them what they did with it, he hoped they would consider selling it to a museum. He was afraid that if it were sold at auction, it would disappear, a trophy hidden in the vacation home of an oil tycoon. Jennifer Felix was bewildered by what was happening. It was just a typewriter in a basement. But Mullaney had made an impression. 'It was lost for half a century,' she said. 'We didn't want it to get lost again.' 'To me it's just a typewriter,' she continued. 'But to other people it's history; it's a story, a life, a treasure.' Instructions and a box of tools were used to cast more Chinese character bars for the MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT Mullaney figured out that Jennifer Felix's grandfather, Douglas Arthur Jung, had been a machinist at Mergenthaler Linotype. It's likely that when the company moved offices, he took the machine home. Then it was passed down to Felix's father, who, for more than a decade, had kept the MingKwai with him. 'That's what my dad decided to keep and bring across the country when they moved,' Felix said. Advertisement Keys on the MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT Why, of all he had inherited from his own father, did he hang on to this typewriter? She doesn't know. But she feels it must have been a conscious choice: The MingKwai would not have been packed by accident. It weighs more than 50 pounds. In April, the couple made their decision. They sold the machine for an undisclosed amount to the Stanford University Libraries, which acquired it with the help of a private donor. This spring, the MingKwai made its way back across the country. When it was lifted out of the crate onto the floor at a Stanford warehouse, Mullaney lay down to look at it. The history professor could see that it was full of intricate machinery, far more delicate than any other typewriter he'd seen, and he began to imagine how engineers might help him understand it -- perhaps revealing what was going on in Lin's mind in 1947 when he invented a machine he thought could rescue China. Perhaps they could even build a new one. Lying on his stomach, Mullaney began to wonder. The MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT This article originally appeared in


USA Today
3 days ago
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