When Tessa Hulls set out to write a book about three generations of women in her family, she had few illusions about how hard the task would be.
The tale was geographically sprawling, and spanned a century: Her grandmother Sun Yi, a journalist in Shanghai, fled China for Hong Kong in 1957, then slowly went mad; her mother, Rose, attended an elite boarding school in Hong Kong founded in part for the mixed-race children of European expatriates, then moved to the United States in 1970.
Much of her family’s story was accessible only via her grandmother’s memoir, a best seller published in Hong Kong and written in Mandarin — a language that Hulls, who was born and raised in Northern California, could not read — and through her mother, whom Hulls had spent a lifetime running away from.
To make matters even more difficult, Hulls, a painter, adventurer and itinerant jack-of-all-trades, was not really a writer. Over the years, she had painted murals in Ghana, worked as a cook and amateur D.J. in Antarctica, and bicycled from Southern California to Maine. She had created posters and book covers and participated in art shows. But she’d never written a book, let alone a graphic novel.
So, in 2015, when she began the project, she created a checklist of things to do before the writing began. The first three tasks: Learn history. Learn (some) Chinese. Learn to draw comics.
