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.
