GINSENG ROOTS: A Memoir, by Craig Thompson
“It doesn’t matter what your politics are,” Will Hsu, the farmer and president of Ginseng Enterprises, tells his employees at a party in 2017, in “Ginseng Roots,” the second graphic memoir by Craig Thompson. “Now is the time to MAKE AMERICAN GINSENG GREAT AGAIN.” Thompson draws himself standing by, raising a glass. “What exactly am I toasting to?” he thinks.
Hsu is a first-generation American with a Harvard M.B.A. and a love of logistics; he has his labor prices calculated to the penny and his eye on high-tech applications for his ginseng, a plant used in traditional Chinese medicine but often grown in the United States. Thompson is at the party to gather material for a book about the industry that incorporates his own experience working on the other end of it: Beginning when Thompson was 10, he and his mother, brother and sister worked Wisconsin’s ginseng fields to supplement his father’s jobs as an apprentice plumber and a hardware store clerk. (For weeding and rock-picking, the kids each got $1 per hour, which Thompson emphasizes was spent on comics.)
For the Hsus, the crop is a different kind of family tradition. Will’s father, Paul, emigrated to the United States from Taiwan in 1969, just as enthusiastic about American opportunity as his son would become. The Hsu farm exports ginseng internationally as well as marketing to Chinese Americans; their business relies on a combined work force of white Americans and immigrant and guest workers, many of whom are Hmong and Mexican.
By the time the book ends, in 2021, the Hsu family fortune has diminished. Since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, anti-Chinese sentiment has become not merely trendy, but politically regnant. “We failed,” Hsu tells Thompson at the end.
At the party in 2017, Hsu was proposing a toast to his family’s new roots in America; he misjudged their depth. He’s one of many subjects in Thompson’s memoir, but his arc feels especially tragic.
“Ginseng Roots” is a shaggy, imperfect, often beautiful almost-diary. It is partly a sequel to Thompson’s 2003 memoir, “Blankets,” about his abusive childhood and subsequent departure from fundamentalist Christianity; partly a travel diary in the vein of his 2004 “Carnet de Voyage”; and — most successfully — an engaging piece of long-form journalism about the unlikely coalition of interests that make up this small, eccentric agricultural sector, and the huge cultural differences that run through it. He interviews his family, his old employers and the now grown kids who worked the same fields he did. I was not a person who cared about the international ginseng business last month, but I am now.
Thompson has a particular genius for unsentimental depictions of blue-collar American life and its competing pressures, loyalties and traumas. A white veteran who recalls being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam agrees to hire Hmong families on his farm only after realizing “the Hmongs were on our side” in the war. Parents are blasé about their children handling pesticides, not to mention the idea of child labor in the first place: When Thompson returns to his hometown as an adult, the farmers who hired him years ago complain that nobody but immigrant laborers is willing to work as hard as he used to — at 10.
“Ginseng Roots” is Thompson’s most visually arresting work so far (with the possible exception of “Space Dumplins,” his underappreciated graphic novel for young readers). Every two-color page shows off some new and unexpected layout or brush technique — there are cutaways and maps and mythical creatures and beautiful, allusive drawings of tigers and flames. And yet the book is never too busy; each image drives home its point deftly and quickly. When one panel is supposed to suggest the next, it does, and when it’s supposed to stand alone, it does that, too.
His most interesting characters contain subtle subversions, have surprising motivations or remain mysterious even to themselves: a gentle old couple who are also casually racist, a strict Hmong farmer who turns out to have fought the Viet Cong as a child soldier, Thompson’s own father who has aged out of his former brutality into a sweet old man, grateful to see his children. Thompson is less successful when trying to extract more general, unambiguous conclusions from his delicate vignettes — for example when a white acupuncturist, about whom Thompson tells us only a little, narrates some of the ideas behind traditional Chinese medicine.
But this is a memoir, and Thompson seems to feel obliged to come to some conclusions about himself. He tells us that the original, Chinese method of extracting ginseng from the ground is laborious but preserves every tiny root thread intact, while the American method uses tractors to “tear thousands of cultivated roots from the ground in a matter of hours,” leaving a network of disconnected root threads in the ground. What kind of root is the author, having left Wisconsin for good? What about the other characters, some devoted to their cultures of origin, some isolated from them by choice or by circumstance?
I suspect the metaphor is too tidy. We can never perfectly preserve our cultural ties, but neither can we sever them. Maybe the memories themselves are the real source of revelation, and in “Ginseng Roots,” Thompson offers these in abundance.
GINSENG ROOTS: A Memoir | By Craig Thompson | Pantheon | 447 pp. | $35
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