Growing up in the farm community of Marathon, Wisconsin, Craig Thompson and his siblings joined their mother to work as on the area ginseng farms, pulling weeds and rocks as kids. At that time in the 1980s, Marathon, a town of 1200, was the biggest producer of cultivated American ginseng in the world. The kids saw it as a way to make money to buy comic books, a hobby that led to Thompson’s career as a graphic novelist. Blankets, his 2003 coming-of-age autobiography, won multiple awards. In his new graphic novel, Ginseng Roots, Thompson returns to rural Wisconsin to revisit the farms he grew up on. It’s labelled as a memoir, but also weaves in journalism, history, and travelogue elements.
Ahead of his in-store appearance at Boswell Book Company on May 27, we asked Thompson a few questions about his inspirations and where the ginseng industry is today.
Tell us who you’d pick to be a Betty this year!
What inspired you to revisit ginseng and write about it?
It started with reading Michael Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire, which is about plants that shaped civilization as much as we shaped them as species. The book really inspired me and I wanted to do my own book about plants, but unlike Michael Pollan I don’t have that scientific research driven botany background, so what plant might I have any intimacy or knowledge of? Ginseng. Then I realized I had an even bigger story to tell about ginseng’s role in the Us-China trade relationship and all these shifting dynamics of globalization.
What was the ginseng industry like when you were a kid working on these farms compared to today?
It’s quite different. In the 1980s it was small family farms and a family might have a half acre garden, or if they were a big grower, up to two acres. They usually had teenagers or people like my mom, who was a stay at home mom working in their fields during the summer. It was pretty rare even then to be kids working in the gardens, but we grew up on a little hobby farm where we grew our own vegetables, so we were used to being in gardens as children.
By the ’90s, everything was changing. Part of that was because of the Canadians. Smoking was going out of fashion and the Canadian government offered incentives to tobacco farmers to grow a different crop, and a lot them switched over to ginseng. Suddenly you have these large scale corporate farmers growing ginseng and they put all these family farms in Wisconsin out of business overnight. The ones that survived had to start growing at a really large scale, 800 acres of ginseng versus just one or two.
Also, the white workforce went away and has primarily been replaced by Mexican laborers who are bussed up for a six month agricultural season. In the ’90s it was mostly Hmong immigrants who were willing to do that hard agricultural labor, so it’s changed a lot.
In the book, you’re straight forward about the challenges you faced to creating it. Can you explain some of those?
One was a midlife career crisis where I was just doubting if I wanted to keep creating graphic novels at all. That’s why it was useful for me to go back to my first job when I was ten years old to meditate on work and work ethics and the meaning of it.
Also, I have an ongoing health issue with both my hands, a degenerative genetic condition, which seems to be aggressive and accelerated. I’ve been dealing with that since the beginning of the project and it’s just gotten worse and worse. I pursued almost everything you can do in Western medicine – I got radiation treatments, I had surgery, all kinds of physical therapy, finally at the end of the project organically I ended up being a patient of Chinese medicine. First with acupuncture, but then with Chinese herbs and the formulas included ginseng as the primary herb.
As this book is released, there’s been a trade war with China and a crackdown on immigration, people who might work on these farms. Is that affecting the ginseng industry?
My Wausau, Wisconsin event is on May 29 with Will Hsu, the Taiwanese-American grower featured in Chapter 5 (of Ginseng Roots). We’re probably going to unpack that, because he’s got a better handle dealing every day trading in China and Taiwan. It’s so inconsistent- every day is changing so it’s hard to keep on top of what’s happening.
It’s changing book publishing a lot, I’ll say – most American book publishers print in China. My book was rejected by Chinese printers- it did not pass the censorship because Ginseng Roots acknowledges the autonomy of Taiwan, it also has a couple depictions of Chairman Mao and you’re not allowed to depict political leaders. In the end that was probably a blessing because if it was printed in China there would be all kinds of shipments that would be held up right now in the Tariff War – I know that happened to other authors.
You’re returning to Wisconsin, any must do places to go or favorite foods, anything like that?
Mostly just reconnecting with friends. I’m more nostalgic for Milwaukee than where I grew up, because Milwaukee is where I came of age. I love the nature of Wisconsin, so I especially like coming back in Autumn because I’ve been in the Pacific Northwest for so long, where it’s evergreen and there’s no autumn and it gets soggy. The smells and fall colors – that’s also associated with ginseng harvest.
Craig Thompson discusses Ginseng Roots at Boswell Book Company on Tuesday, May 27, 6:30pm. The event is free but registration is required: craigthompsonmke.eventbrite.com
