GINSENG ROOTS

A noted graphic novelist explores the complex story of ginseng, the medicinal root with an oddly humanlike shape.

Ginseng is “prized in Chinese medicine,” Thompson writes, but it is also grown in the perhaps unlikely confines of rural Wisconsin, where he grew up. Put to work harvesting ginseng as a child, Thompson recounts, he dreamed of doing something different, “the fantasy of a career path that could transcend our economic class.” That “different” path involved writing comic books and, in time, graphic novels, rejecting his parents’ fundamentalist Christianity and forsaking the countryside for downtown Portland, Oregon. Yet, for all the slugs and mosquitoes, the scorching heat and freezing cold, and the endless labor of harvesting the stuff, Thompson, now approaching 50, chose ginseng as the avenue by which to write of his life, with its nagging working-class guilt that “what I do isn’t real work.” But it is: Writing about ginseng itself takes him into the lives of others, from Hmong refugees in California (and from there the Midwest, and now to Oklahoma to grow legal marijuana), to farmers and agronomists in China and Taiwan. He’s learned much in his travels, as when a back-to-the-lander tells him that a ginseng monoculture is as harmful as any other single-crop agriculture, defeated by companion planting: “The forest, like the human body, is not simply an assemblage of parts, but an open system in communication with itself.” He returns, too, to Wisconsin, with a newfound respect for his parents’ hard lives, even as they respect his choices. Thompson’s closing is poignant and memorable, enshrining the recognition that all the labor of ginseng is a Sisyphean one, since “the value is in what’s left behind in the gouged out earth.”

A spectacular and inspired graphic memoir that traces the many threads of a remarkable root.