'What is seen on top may be serene, but beneath there is a battle for survival going on among the roots and weeds, all fighting over water and iron and copper and calcium and magnesium, day after day. Bloodroot and jewel weed, galax and hepatica, ginger and wild yam. Ginseng must compete with all of them. It is this constant tension that gives the ginseng root its gnarled appearance — the wrinkles speaking of character more than age."

Reading Jeff Talarigo's "The Ginseng Hunter," we find ourselves in a lush, evanescent environment — redwoods and juniper and cedar and loamy dark earth and deep-hidden ginseng roots. The ginseng hunter is a farmer living on the border of North Korea and China, by the banks of the Tumen River. He comes from several generations of ginseng hunters. His mother and uncle have died of starvation.

He makes the eight-hour journey on foot to town to sell his ginseng and sees a young North Korean woman who has been taken from her daughter and forced into prostitution. A young girl finds her way onto the ginseng hunter's land. We believe it might be the daughter, but we cannot be sure.

The madam at the brothel offers the hunter a chance to buy the prostitute, but he takes too long to think about it. Still, we imagine another world, a happy scene, a reunion of mother and daughter and the three living as a family in the foothills of those beautiful mountains. A place where soldiers do

The beauty and power of the ginseng root; the respect of the hunter for the thing he hunts — all this lies in such sharp contrast to the wasted life and utter lack of humanity elsewhere on these pages.