“Because there were no flowers, I began picking up bones.”—Georgia O’Keeffe
When I was ten, my parents bought their first house in a “nicer” neighborhood in Las Vegas, one street away from the town of Henderson’s better schools and higher property values. My parents’ brand-new house was built after they selected their favorite of the model homes, and it was roughly interchangeable with every other brand-new tan stucco house in the development. Their first semi-permanent home, the first place we lived for more than one lease cycle, they tried to make it nice. For their first backyard, they bought plants that they weren’t prepared to care for.
My mother insisted that they needed to buy better soil, or they were just wasting their money, but my father wouldn’t listen. Dirt is dirt, he said, and it was stupid and illogical to buy dirt. He liked to talk in terms of logic, and you were stupid if you didn’t understand what was so clearly logical to him.
Even without understanding exactly why the land was so bad, my mother and I knew that nothing could take root there. She was both mad and disappointed when all the plants they liked died, one after the other, over the course of the next six years—the spindly young nectarine tree, the fragrant gardenia bush with its dark glossy leaves opening skyward, the strawberry plant whose velvet greens hugged the ground. Each time, we would come home with plants happy and healthy from the nursery, and my father would bury their roots in a shallow soon-to-be grave.
There were a few exceptions, like the red rose bush I kept alive in high school through sheer force of will, cutting it back with a love that felt harsh but essential. Or the oleander, with its delicate pink blooms and dagger-like leaves, beautiful and poisonous and hardier than anything. But the ones my parents really liked weren’t meant to be in the desert, certainly not the driest desert in North America. They might have survived with a lot of care: fertilizer to give them nutrients absent from the local soil, more space in which to spread their roots, an irrigation system pumping way more water than my parents could imagine. But my parents were not prepared for the work and expense of nurturing these plants in an uncommonly harsh landscape. My parents were from a time and place where things just grew, enough at least to outweigh the things that just died.
My mother would tell me about the mulberry bushes that grew wild around her childhood home in Nantong, recounted with nostalgic delight how she would eat them straight off the bush after school until her hands and mouth were stained the color of a fresh bruise. She told me about the silkworms she used to take care of, feeding the fat white squirming blobs fresh leaves from those same bushes. She told me about gardenias and chrysanthemums so fragrant she cried thinking about them. All the flowers were more fragrant in China. Maybe it was something in the soil. Sometimes her stories felt so far away, I wondered if I’d imagined them. Maybe she felt that way, too.
I wanted lushness, like the rich green garden my mother conjured from memory. I wanted my mother to be happy, wanted us to be a happy American family like the ones I saw on TV. I wanted swings hanging from stately old-growth trees and lawns that needed mowing and siblings who defended you and parents who liked each other and fathers who patiently taught their children to ride bikes and drive and be in the world. But there were no TV families in Las Vegas. Las Vegas was not built for families. Las Vegas was built to be an adult oasis, a mirage in an exceptionally inhospitable desert. Las Vegas was a testament to man’s hubris and ingenuity and ceaseless grasping.
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In 1917, a 28-year-old Georgia O’Keeffe stopped in Sante Fe, NM for the first time and was struck by the otherworldly, monumental landscapes of the desert southwest. At the time of this first brief visit, her mother had been dead for fifteen months. Another fifteen months after this visit, her father would die too. The next time O’Keeffe returned to New Mexico was 1934, after a year in which she did not paint and was hospitalized for a breakdown. A now-47-year-old O’Keeffe visited Ghost Ranch, a 21,000-acre retreat about an hour northwest of Santa Fe, marked by dramatic canyons, red rock cliffs, endless sky, and the life-granting Rito del Yeso stream snaking through. O’Keeffe enjoyed walking through the grounds and collecting animal bones bleached white by the sun, and she returned from this visit with renewed creative vigor. Eventually, after the death of her husband in 1946, she would move to Abiquiú, just fourteen miles from Ghost Ranch, and remained there. Her time in the desert southwest was, by all appearances, a balm for her grief.
Completed in 1935, a year after O’Keeffe’s first visit to Ghost Ranch, Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock Hills marks the beginning of a new period in her life. In this painting, a ram skull floats like a ghost in the foreground. Behind it, foreboding gray clouds brood above rust-colored hills pocked with small gray-green trees. (Mesquites, I’d guess, though I don’t know the plants of the Rio Grande.) Most of the background is sky. The brown horns of the skull curve outward, looking improbably large against the ram’s head pared down to bone. At the junctures, the bone is flaking away, dried and bleached by the desert sun. To the left of the skull, floating in the first curve of the horn, is a white hollyhock flower, pale yellow in the center. If I squint, I might think it’s the sun.
I first learned about O’Keeffe’s work in a fifth-grade art class in 2001, shortly after my parents moved us to that nicer neighborhood. Initially, I loved her floral paintings, how colorful and fun they were. The petals looked creamy, evoking a sensory deliciousness that I could not imagine existing in the austere desert that surrounded me. The flowers reminded me of the parks in the East Coast where I’d been born, or my grandparents’ picturesque riverside town in China where I spent my toddlerhood, or the lush gardens I now saw and lusted after only on TV. Everywhere else I looked, I saw green, each a slightly different shade in my memory. These shades of green could support a life.
In contrast, O’Keeffe’s desert paintings puzzled me. Why would anyone dedicate their time to these empty landscapes full of boring browns and beiges and death? How could anyone love the desert so much? As I grew up and learned more about her life and work, I came to see it as an inversion of my own experience with the desert, the site of my deepest griefs. But I remind myself there’s a difference between Ghost Ranch and Las Vegas, between being 47 and ten, between retreat and captivity, between each of our ghosts.
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After spending my early adulthood in San Francisco, I moved back to Las Vegas for the first time in sixteen years—an entire half of my lifetime, a twisted kind of sweet sixteen. I had spent my whole childhood trying to get out of Las Vegas, and I succeeded in moving away for college and then grad school and first jobs. But I spent a lot of my time away feeling like an escaped convict on the run, giddy with freedom but knowing I was on borrowed time. After my mother died, I spent all of my twenties in San Francisco, trying to avoid ever going back to Las Vegas and the world of pain it represented. On the edges of my consciousness, I always felt hunted.
For several years towards the end, I woke at 3AM nearly every night with my mind racing. What if my father’s house burns down before I scan all our family photos? What if he discards the things I’ve kept there? What if he has another stroke without telling me? What if he takes my mother’s ashes to China without telling me? What if I die in a plane crash before I translate my mother’s manuscript?
What if what if what if pounded in my head late at night like feet on pavement.
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The first time I read something about Las Vegas that felt true was in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. The teenage protagonist, Theo, moves in with his deadbeat father in Las Vegas while grappling with the death of his beloved mother. Through Theo’s eyes, the reader sees “the improbable skyline dwindled into a wilderness of parking lots and outlet malls, loop after faceless loop of shopping plazas…” In the desert surrounding the city, Theo sees a harsh sort of beauty too, compared with the urban bustle of New York, where he had lived with his mother and fallen asleep each night watching the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling. “Now, transfigured—cold and glorious like deities with their disguises flung off—it was as if [the stars had] flown through the roof and into the sky to assume their true, celestial homes.”
I was floored by the accuracy of Tartt’s description of Las Vegas—the endless liminal space version that tourists don’t see. This portion of the book is brief, but it’s the part I remember most vividly, because I lived my own version of it. Perhaps what resonated most was the way Theo’s experience of Las Vegas was hopelessly entangled with his experience of grief. Like Theo, I had been a child brought to Las Vegas from a lusher East Coast city. I, too, saw the desert as cold and empty. Like Theo, I was grappling with the death of my own beloved mother. I had my own emotionally neglectful father and stepmother in Las Vegas who did not know what to do with me. A little older, however, I’d escaped to San Francisco to become a graduate student, a role in which I gave mice cancer and then dissected their tumors in a vain effort to avenge my mother’s death. Like Theo, that decision had been dictated by my mother’s death, by my bewildered grief, and by the banal brutality of our lives in Las Vegas.
For years, I recommended The Goldfinch to everyone who asked me about what it was like to grow up there. I’m always the only person they’ve ever met from Las Vegas, and I always quip that it’s because no one ever gets out.
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In Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock Hills, the ram skull is centered, but the larger-than-life white hollyhock flower to its left is just as important. Hollyhock flowers look like a cross between a poppy and a rose, though their petals are more delicate, like tissue paper. Its stems can feed a fire. Its roots can heal a wound. A symbol of fecundity or even ambition, hollyhock scatters hundreds of seeds. This is a common adaptation by desert wildflowers to perpetuate survival of the species when the individuals die each year during the dry season. I always found this kind of sacrifice to be deeply sad, like survival of something else is the best they can hope for.
After my mother’s cancer diagnosis in 2007, she began to write books. In her unpublished novel draft that I finally translated and read in 2023, there’s a scene in which the protagonist speaks with her daughter, who is applying to college. “Why would I pay for college, when I can get a scholarship?” the daughter says. “Besides, what college I go to won’t matter as much as medical school.” The protagonist reflects that her daughter has far surpassed her. She concludes that she has failed in this life, and it’s too late for her, because she is dying. But she is hopeful that her daughter will succeed. We are not so different, hollyhock and humans, desperately clawing towards a better future that we will not live to see.
Hollyhocks grew in O’Keeffe’s New Mexico garden, but in a drier climate like the Mojave, they struggle to survive. I read that O’Keeffe hated when people read too much into her paintings. She might not have liked for someone to ascribe traits like fecundity or ambition to the hollyhock she painted. She might not have liked for a museum curator to describe her painting of a skull with a white flower as either a portent of mortality or a symbol of creative renewal after grief. But as a writer, I can’t help but see symbolism in plants that grow in one dry clime but not another, not mine.
I’m thinking about the bleached bones O’Keeffe collected as her symbols of the desert. I’m remembering that, like O’Keeffe, my parents initially came to the desert from the East Coast hoping for a kind of renewal. When they left Pittsburgh for Las Vegas, they left behind academic dreams and disappointment, left behind the house shared with eight other Chinese graduate students, left behind the technician job in a diabetes lab, left behind the kind Polish landlady I called Grandma Stella, left behind Grandpa Joe who gifted my first books and stuffed animals, left behind my first school where I learned nursery rhymes in German, left behind the fraternal twins who were my best friend and worst enemy, left behind city parks so green they looked like a forest, left behind the red brick house on Lodi Way, left behind the shiny red tricycle that never got stolen from the porch, left behind the vision they once had of what our lives would be.
The bones are what get left behind when a life has ended.
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In July 2024, after I moved back to Las Vegas, we had a record-breaking 120-degree day within a record-breaking string of days hotter than 115. Afterwards a palm tree inexplicably burst into flame with the first monsoon rain. In this period of “excessive heat,” as warned by my weather app, the young saguaros in the backyard yellowed and withered, despite my husband’s best efforts to give them extra water each day. The summers are too dry and hot in the Mojave for these tall cacti that look like people. If this were fiction, the symbolism might seem too on the nose.
Early in her time in New Mexico, Georgia O’Keeffe said of the bleached bones that inspired her iconic “desert” paintings, “To me they are as beautiful as anything I know. To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around…” During all the years I’d lived in Las Vegas as a child, I’d felt like an animal trying to escape the harsh environs. In addition to the physical harshness, the desert represented, for me, the city’s cultural barrenness, the lack of museums, the lack of Chinese community, the lack of educational opportunities for someone who was poor and bookish and ambitious. In my angsty teenage journals, I wrote that nothing can grow in this desert, including me.
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In a way, when I finally did return, it was a relief to not have to dread it anymore. I couldn’t have stayed away forever. There were the practical reasons: I was an only child with an aging father who spoke little English. After my first book launch, I’d quit my job to freelance and recover from burnout. I was hemorrhaging money on my nice-but-not-that-nice apartment. My father needed help fixing up an empty rental house and landscaping its empty dirt lot of a backyard. Having leapt off the corporate hamster wheel, I would never be able to afford a house in San Francisco.
There were the more existential reasons: The longer I stayed away, the more frayed my already-strained relationship with my father became, and the more we seemed to avoid each other. I was ostensibly trying to write more books, at least one of which was ostensibly in response to my mother’s unfinished autobiographical novel of a failed life in Las Vegas. I say “ostensibly” because in reality I was mostly procrastinating. It was so intolerably painful for me to think about Las Vegas—the death of my mother, the emotional void of my father, the repressed memories of my childhood, the fundamental aloneness I had always felt in the world—that I would do just about anything to avoid it. As long as I wasn’t physically there, I knew I could succeed in continuing my once-helpful, now self-sabotaging dissociation.
Las Vegas was like a fish bone stuck in my throat, stabbing tenderly into the soft wet flesh. I was choking, but not enough to die, only enough to be a little uncomfortable all the time. Maybe in the long-term the fish bone would give me sepsis and kill me indirectly, but that was a problem for tomorrow, because I wanted to avoid the pain right now. Without some kind of push I couldn’t bring myself to cough the damn thing out. So when I decided, reluctantly, to move back to Las Vegas and “confront my demons,” as I told some acquaintances half-jokingly, I thought maybe, finally, this was the push I needed.
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Appropriate for my experience of it, the word “desert” is associated with abandonment. A desert is a place that has been abandoned by rain. To desert is to abandon. The desert city of Las Vegas is a place for people to desert their lives, better known for demolition than excavation. When something isn’t working, blow it up, ditch it, and start over. It’s something my late Grandma Audrey, a family friend who turned into family, actually loved about the city. There’s always something new here. If you’re trying to forget your old life in Pittsburgh or Cincinnati, this might be the place for you. But what if this is your old life? What if this is the life you were trying to forget? The Las Vegas tourism website says of the city’s history of casino demolitions, “Everybody loves to watch things blow up.” Is that true?
I lived in Vegas, albeit as a child, for at least nine casino implosions, and I never saw a single one. On July 17, 2024, about a week after the hottest day on record, The Mirage Hotel and Casino closed, its iconic man-made volcano soon to be similarly demolished and replaced with something new. I felt sadder than I expected on the day of its closure, which seemed silly in the grand scheme of things. I had never particularly liked The Mirage as a kid, had never seen any of the animals associated with illusionists Siegfried and Roy because we couldn’t afford it, but the casino was always there, a stalwart of the Las Vegas Strip since before I was born.
When my family first moved to Las Vegas in 1996 and had little to do besides wander the Strip in the evenings, we always stopped to watch The Mirage’s volcano erupt into the neon skyline. I became so spoiled for spectacle that, after a while, I thought it wasn’t so impressive, not nearly as good as Treasure Island’s epic pirate battle with its cannon fire and actors falling dramatically into the water and the nightly sinking captain with his ship—all long gone now.
The Mirage was always a little thematically incoherent to me, with only a geographically vague tropical palm tree theme. A mirage is an optical illusion, an appearance of water in the desert caused by the refraction of light. The whole city of Las Vegas leaned heavily into this oasis imagery, lining countless city streets with incongruous palm trees so you can pretend you are in a tropical paradise. If you squint and imagine humidity, you might believe you’re in a resort in Hawaii, these trees seemed to say.
Most likely, The Mirage and all of Las Vegas drew their thematic inspiration from The Tropicana, an icon of 1950s Vegas that would also be demolished a few months later in October 2024. In a way, The Mirage, which was Steve Wynn’s blueprint for all the megaresorts to come, more consciously represented every visitor’s fantasy of Las Vegas, a town that thrives on illusion. What does it mean that The Mirage has closed? What does it mean that I’ve returned to Las Vegas just as the illusion has ended?
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The things that survive in the desert must adapt to withstand punishing extremes. They learn to shrink their fragile leaves and thicken their skin. Cacti adapted by reducing their leaves to spines, which double as defense, and they store water deep in their protected core. Most succulents have shallow root systems to access water pooled from quick bursts of rain. You can uproot them or even rip off a healthy piece, put them in water somewhere else, and they’ll usually be fine. Mesquite trees, on the other hand, extend their roots far and wide beneath the surface to capture groundwater during long periods of drought. Rooted in place, some plants sit dormant and gray until the rain falls; then, they spring alive to drink their fill.
The native plants of the Mojave have had to adapt even harder, because even deserts are not created equally. A rain-shadow desert, the Mojave is surrounded by large mountain ranges that block out ocean breezes and rainfall, making it the smallest and driest desert in North America—drier than the cold Great Basin in northern Nevada, drier than the Chihuahuan south of O’Keeffe’s old haunts, drier than the Sonoran full of saguaros.
I notice it acutely now on my frequent drives back from my in-laws’ house in Los Angeles. Their Mediterranean climate is dry by East Coast standards but an embarrassment of riches compared with the Mojave desert just a couple hours east. Once you get past the vibrant birds of paradise and bougainvillea, there’s a stretch of highway dotted with Joshua trees and medium-sized shrubs in shades of sage and olive and pear. After a winter or spring shower, you might see a scattering of small yellow flowers, likely desert marigold or brittlebush. As you keep driving towards Las Vegas, past Victorville, past Barstow, past the incongruous ruins of a failed water park in the desert, the Joshua trees disappear, the flowers disappear, and the shrubs get shorter and grayer. If you didn’t know better, you might think they’re not alive at all.
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In the sixteen years since I left for college, a number of museums and cultural institutions have cropped up in Las Vegas. The Neon Museum collects and displays old neon signs from demolished or renovated casinos. The museums at the Springs Preserve tell the history of the city and state, from the springs that brought the early Southern Paiute Desert People to the silver mines to the flashy silver screen. The brand new Ice Age Fossils State Park in North Las Vegas contains one of the largest collections of Ice Age fossils, including the prehistoric bones of mammoths, giant bison, dire wolves, American lions, ground sloths, and more. These animals, now long extinct, lived here in a time before it was desert. Their bones, embedded into the rock like organic graffiti, are proof that once they were here, that once they lived and breathed and blinked their eyes and flicked their tails against their flanks.
“To me [the bones] are as beautiful as anything I know,” O’Keeffe said. “To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around—hair, eyes, and all, with their tails switching.”
I am here. I am picking up bones.
