Longing For Rootedness
A Feature Review of
Ginseng Roots: A Memoir
Craig Thompson
Hardcover: Pantheon, 2025
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Reviewed by Pete Ford
Each June, I notice clusters of five dark leaves growing in the shade in my Midwest backyard. When I used a plant identification app a few years ago, I was surprised to learn the plants might be American ginseng, a cousin of Asian ginseng. Ironically, becoming more attuned to local plants can grow your connection to places halfway across the globe. This is a paradox that Craig Thompson explores in his new graphic memoir, Ginseng Roots.
Two decades after publishing Blankets, his graphic memoir of growing up, Thompson follows up with a graphic memoir of adult anxiety. This is no comic book you read in one sitting; Ginseng Roots is chock-full of narrative, interviews, reflection, and maps. Thompson is a master of the format, and in his hands, the ginseng plant (drawn as a cute little humanoid character) becomes a means to explore a myriad of topics.
Ginseng Roots is just as sprawling and symbolically interconnected as Thompson’s Habibi. He expertly uses a simple color palette in a variety of ways throughout the book. Thompson plays with the shapes and symbolism of Korean and Chinese characters he discovers—for instance, drawing the symbol for ginseng to accentuate how it looks like the ginseng plant.
Memoir is more than autobiography—it is both bracketed and reflective. The frame narrative Thompson uses to focus on ginseng is a trip back to his hometown for an international ginseng festival. As kids, he and his siblings worked in Wisconsin ginseng fields. As an adult, a mix of health problems and emotional anxiety launches him into researching the ginseng industry.
The first few chapters reflect on interacting with his family as an adult. Interestingly, Thompson questions how he portrayed his family members in Blankets. For example, multiple times he contrasts his childhood perception of his father’s anger—replicating a panel from Blankets—with the softening retirement-age man he sees today. His parents and siblings reflect on his portrayals of them, and he introduces the sister he left out of Blankets for simplicity. Later, on an international trip with his brother Phil, Thompson includes a few pages drawn half-and-half by the two brothers.
Thompson reflects on the contrast between his West Coast life and the conservative Midwest town where he grew up. After reflecting on his father’s denial of climate change shown in Blankets, he realizes the irony that “My parents’ lifestyle has less environmental impact than my own. Not traveling, never flying, shopping only at thrift stores… Most of all, growing their own food.” Conversations with his parents and other locals revolve around a certain rust belt nostalgia, the loss of the small town to chain stores, and the lack of a work ethic in today’s youth.
This sparks a few chapters of reflection on work. Thompson feels the guilt of growing up working class and ending up drawing comics. Farmers he worked for as a kid remember his work ethic, but he doesn’t feel that in his current work. Throughout the narrative, he faces physical and mental blocks in writing this “book about ginseng” that we now hold in our hands. He portrayed the angst in a way I can identify with, but I found it tiring when his complaints about writers’ block ran to the end of the book without resolution.
Pain in his drawing hands leads Thompson to both American medicine and traditional Chinese medicine. His acupuncturist explains the use of ginseng in traditional Chinese medicine. “Funny that my Western doctor is Asian and my Chinese Medicine doctor is Caucasian.”
Throughout the book, Thompson raises the issue of cultural appropriation. His previous publisher had warned him of the difficulty of speaking of a culture not his own, and he wrestled with this especially during his international travels. However, it felt like Thompson brought up his awareness of the issue merely to absolve himself. Perhaps to compensate, two of the twelve chapters are narrated by a childhood Hmong friend who grew up to be a ginseng farmer.
As a cultural history of the ginseng plant, Thompson’s drawings are both interesting and informative. In addition to interviews with farmers he knew growing up, Thompson draws maps and historical documents, then eventually travels to South Korea and China. We learn about Eastern mythology of the ginseng plant and the way American farmers have cultivated it over the past three hundred years. The climate of the 45th parallel, the particular red granite soil, and other historical factors in the settling of Wisconsin led his hometown of Marathon to become the ginseng growing capital of America.
Ginseng is a multi-year crop that grows additional sets of leaves each year until it can be harvested in the fifth year. Something about growing ginseng affects the soil, so ginseng cannot be planted again in the same soil. Along the way, Thompson addresses climate change, monoculture, chemical-dependent agriculture, wild-simulated plants, seed patenting, ginseng packaging and marketing, and medicinal uses.
As we near the end, Thompson again visits his parents to spotlight the theme he’s been hinting at with literal ginseng roots: his lack of rootedness. He admits to a friend, “It’s really all I write about. Lost sense of belonging.” At the end of that conversation, the friend leaves him with an ambiguous encouragement that “home is not where I am. Home is HOW I am.” As Thompson tries to land the plane, the last dozen pages feel like circling the airport to find something profound to say.
As I read Ginseng Roots, I compared the plants in my backyard to Thompson’s drawings. Underneath the leaves, I was disappointed to find vines rather than ginseng roots. My plants are more likely Virginia creeper, a cousin of the grape. Like my Virginia creeper, Ginseng Roots spreads broadly and has plenty of foliage to fill out 400 pages. But when we peek under the leaves, we see a vine traveling across the surface rather than a ginseng root tunneling deep into the ground. Thompson’s longing for home is so good, and I wanted this memoir to find him rooted more deeply.
Pete Ford
Pete Ford is a stay-at-home dad as well as a digital marketer for Christian publishers and nonprofits. By night, he is a reader, focusing on topics including nonviolence, time, the built environment, and spiritual practices like Sabbath.
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