My Mother & Ginseng

The price of ginseng has stayed flat, not affected at all by the current inflation. How strange. Just when I think everything is up and up, ginseng comes out and displays its steady price exactly like before, as if to mock my misconception.

The autumn and the coming winter are the appropriate time to take it, especially the American ginseng, which has gradually taken over the Asian stores here, replacing all the Korean ginseng. My friend told me that most of the ginseng sold here are grown in Wisconsin, where digging ginseng without a license anywhere in the state is a punishable crime. Actually within the Asian community here, Wisconsin is more known for its ginseng than its cheese. Advertising posters big or small are plastered in the Asian grocery stores inside and out for Wisconsin ginseng in varied packages. High school girls are hired as vendors during the weekend to sell it, from mid-autumn festival (which is now) to the Christmas holiday, the best time to buy it as gifts for friends or as herbal supplements for oneself.

Ginseng always reminds me of my mother since she took it regularly and believed it to cure all ailments, kind of like a panacea. If one has insomnia, take ginseng to improve the sleep quality; if one sleeps too much, take ginseng to boost one’s energy. Its herbal effectiveness has been raised to the mythical level, which means people would believe anything, no matter how contradictory, about the little turnip like roots. My mother usually boiled ginseng and drank the liquid. However she didn’t throw the leftovers away. She would force me to eat the ginseng dregs, which was completely tasteless. It was just one of her ways of torturing people around her.

Food, including ginseng, was always my mother’s first choice of weapon of torture. Other weapons included giving your stuff away, jeering at your gestures or accents or habits, telling our neighbors or her friends how bad you are and how much she sacrificed for you, and a lot more, which I am compiling right now into a manifesto.

I don’t think my parents, especially my mother, were born to be tormentors, but after a while they developed the habit of plaguing each other in almost every interaction. Food was my mother’s favorite tool. For example, she hated cooking but had to cook every day. My father liked a small plate of pan-fried peanuts to go with his sorghum liquor for dinner, but it always came out wrong. The peanuts were either too salty, fried too long to be half charcoaled, or not sufficiently cooked. I thought at the time that my mother did it deliberately to force my father to go pan-fry his own peanuts since nobody else would eat that. My father steadfastly refused to do it—having a woman fry his peanuts was a prerogative that he did not want to relinquish. He had to have such peanuts, despite of the fact that it ws cooked with my mother’s bitterness, eaten under my mother’s accusing eyes. My poor father. He wanted a little token of love, but my mother refused to indulge him.

Now looking back, I wonder if my parents could have a better relationship if they were living a different life style, where extended family members all lived together. At dinner table, ten people ate together, all food were cooked by one family member who was the best cook among the relatives. In an extended family, my parents would not even have so many opportunities to be battling each other… Is this called a form of anachronism, which means they were born into a wrong era? They were not made for a modern nuclear family.