"adding my color to the desert:" reflections on being a woman of color in a primarily white community
two new abstract paintings on view at Compound YV in Yucca Valley
The Desert Will Hold You
Content notes: The below essay explores themes of racism and fetishization. If you’d prefer to listen to an audio recording of the piece, click the play button below.
I’ve started getting my nails done again, because it gives me some semblance of what used to be my old life. Dan, at the salon, shows me his drawings, hyper-realistic and done in charcoal, rolled up in a carrying case, brought from his country during a lifetime before the one we both find ourselves in. I ask him if he misses it, his old life; he says he doesn’t know. I say the same, and in our understanding we write a passing note to melancholy. He tells me this while he scrapes the paint from my fingernails, before he notices the ink sunk into the edges of my callused fingers.
He is not surprised I am here, until I tell him I am not on Base. I’ve been here for a few months now, so I know that a young asian woman, new to the desert, is assumed to be a military wife. I learned this first from the man at the Spectrum counter when I picked up my internet modem, and then the teller at Walmart. Dan tells me there are a lot of Filipinos here, of course, but that they are on Base. Military wives. Twentynine Palms. He looks up:
“Why else would you come here?”
He holds my gaze for a moment before realizing I don’t know, then looks back down to my nails.
The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms is the largest in the United States, 596,288 acres, down Highway 62, a few miles away from my newly purchased 0.25 acres in Joshua Tree. I think of myself more as the keeper of this land than its owner, though I doubt the Marines feel the same. I’m told the men hate to be stationed here, in the desert, that it’s the worst base to be assigned to: too remote, too hot, too few women. They take their orders when the desert calls though, but then again, they don’t have a choice.
I moved to the desert because I felt the land spoke to me; I moved here because I liked how my paint behaved in the heat and how much I could hear myself in the stillness. I moved because the desert called me, too, because the voices I pretended not to hear for years were louder here. I moved because of years of running away, I was ready to run towards something. And I was ready to hear. I didn’t realize until later, that the low rumbles and whispers were not from ground’s fault lines, but from the distant drop of test bombs in the Little Baghdad training area of Twentynine Palms. I didn’t realize until later that maybe, the land was not singing – but screaming. I moved here because I felt the desert would hold me, not realizing that it would first, harden me. I think about the men who get sent here to be hardened: now that I think about it, that’s the whole point. I think about the military wives.
David, at the store, has taken to calling me ‘Kiddo,’ which I like. He still can’t get over how good my English is, for an Oriental, even though I tell him I was born and raised here in the States.
“It’s really amazing,” he says, as he brings out his Oriental wife, hidden until now in the back, to have her come hear.
Her English is not very good, but I don’t ask questions, because he’s a vet, and she’s a military wife, and they’ve been together since Saigon and I don’t have the heart to correct him. He compliments my English every time. He asks me why I came here, I mutter something about the light and how my paint dries in the heat. I tell him the desert called me.
“She’s a fickle bitch,” he says, as I take my change, “don’t let her tease you, she’ll always win.”
I will my new plants to take in the desert soil as my neighbor drives by on his golf cart, offering to pick up my mail from halfway down the block. It’s my fifth month here and the first time he’s done this. Skeptical, at first, of a young asian woman with her white fluffy dog and painted canvases at the end of his street. Resigned, at first, to the gentrification coming to his doorstep via an Airbnb making it to his edge of the desert. Convinced, finally, that I was actually living there, ‘yes – full-time,’ with no intention of renting to ‘people like me.’ Confused, eventually, at why in the world I would decide to do so.
“Yer still here, Alex!”
“I am Tim, and I still intend to be here tomorrow!”
“Well if the heat didn’t scare you away, I guess you can stay!” he says with a twinkle in his eye, his tone, finally, approaching that of a grandparent.
“Do you want me to get yer mail, Alex?”
“No thank you, Tim,” I yell across the picket fence, “but I appreciate it.”
I don’t tell Tim this, but I already know I don’t have mail because my house, inexplicably, came with no mailbox. The post office still doesn’t know I am here, despite my best efforts. When I visit its counter and tell Nancy, who works afternoons, my address, she insists it doesn’t exist. I’m not sure if she’s talking about the house or talking about me. It seems I was erased, before I even came.
I make a friend and we go for pizza. The desert menus all feature mocktails and 0% ABV beers, less for the health-conscious transplants from LA and more for the desert rat former alcoholics. At least that’s what the waitress tells me as I order at the bar, mentally categorizing me as more the former than the latter when I consider myself somewhere in between.
Back at the table, I ask my new friend if she eats cheese, knowing full well that her body likely can’t process lactose either.
“I do, but I shouldn’t,” she says, “same with gluten, not to be annoying like that.”
The restaurant offers a vegan and gluten-free options, definitely for the health-conscious transplants, but we decide to risk it, thinking maybe a ‘normal’ order won’t give us away. But we’re the only two asian women eating in on a Wednesday, our skin adorned with few, if any, visible tattoos. No one stares, at least not explicitly, but I know they take note. Few words pass between us on this topic, but few words need to. We’ve both lived enough of life to just know.
On a night here, later, a man will come up and ask me my name. I’ll be polite, but distant, evading the follow-up for a phone number. He’ll find me on Instagram anyway and start to follow me, in more ways than one.
“your so exotic haha” he’ll say, replying with a heart-eyed emoji to every photo I post of myself, “let me introduce you to the desert.”
I tell him I’ll find my own way, not realizing how small of a community this is, not realizing how he’s already stamped his claim on me to people I have yet to meet. I’ll tell this to the woman at Great Clips, as she cuts the last few inches of highlighted ends off my hair. Jet black for the first time in years.
“Oh honey,” she says, “you’re fresh meat. We don’t get many girls that look like you around here.”
I’ll sit in her chair facing the mirror, watching the light bits of my hair fall to the ground. Thinking about who used to run their hands through them. Realizing that these were the last bits they could have touched. The pain feels duller now, more melancholy than regret. I think that maybe I should take a bit off the floor, put it in an envelope, offer it to the desert. Let the land witness my goodbye. But I don’t; I decide the cut is ritual enough.
“Can I refill your glass?” my new friend asks, offering our shared bottle of wine towards me. I look up and realize her face is starting to warm, porcelain skin pink from one glass in, and say yes.
“What brought you to the desert? How did you end up here?” I ask, as I swirl the tart orange wine in my mouth.
“I don’t know honestly… I kinda feel like I was called here? Sort of like I didn’t have a choice? Now that I say that out loud, I don’t even know if those things are different? Does that sound crazy?” she laughs nervously.
Softly I add, “No… I get that,” as we both get quiet.
I realize in the silence that neither of us knows if what we are losing is worth what we have found. A few months later, she’ll leave.
A woman at the Joshua Tree Saloon asks me if my family is desert people (perhaps this is why I came?).
“Oh no, my parents actually haven’t even been here,” I’ll reply with a polite smile that ends the conversation. I grab my beer, wary of continuing on the topic.
I’ve taken to coming to the Saloon in the middle of the day, to journal at a picnic table in the shade. There are few, if any, locals here; instead, I am surrounded by tourists in hiking gear eating french fries before venturing a few minutes south, into the national park. No one bothers me and no one stares, too busy with their children or their panting dogs or their selfies. As I write, I think of the woman’s question:
I suppose us Filipinos are jungle people and ocean people, tropical island people, from a constellation of islands in a sea half a world away. When I decided to move, my aunt reminded me that my great grandfather was once in the desert, on a death march in World War II, marching as a captive. He’s the only other family member we can think of that has ever spent time in a desert – and not intentionally, she notes pointedly.
“Hija, the desert is not a place to go,” she says, “unless you have a death wish.”
I remember this exchange often as I move in the heat, as I think about whether we are desert people, whether I am a desert person. I ask this to the desert out loud, picking at my calluses as I watch my skin get darker. Feeling my black hair absorb the sun.
Adding My Color to the Desert
Before I started to spend time in the desert, I imagined it as a place devoid of color: a vast expanse of beiges, browns, pops of washed-out green — on occasion, the muted pastels of sunset. Living here now, I know the natural environment is anything but. The audacious magentas and yellows of flowering cacti. The deep purple of the sand as it gets kissed by the sunset. The oranges, the greens, the shifting blues of the sky.
What I didn’t realize until I moved here though, was that the desert is also so white. Most recent census estimates (2022) reported Joshua Tree town as 83% white — compared to a national estimate of 75% and a San Francisco county estimate of 50%. Asian alone, 2.6% — in the 2010 census, it was reported that there were 18 asian people out of 7,414 people living in Joshua Tree. 18!
Said differently, for every Asian person in my town, there are 32 white people.
Now, I have occupied primarily white spaces my entire life; many — no, most — of my closest friends are white, many of my past romantic partners were white, my two closest friends in the desert are white. For most of my life I’ve felt more comfortable in these spaces than in spaces of color (a whole nother essay, for a whole nother time). But I grew up and have lived in primarily coastal, liberal, and much more diverse places: places where race and ethnicity co-mingled. Places where my white friends grew up with Asian and Black and Hispanic friends, places where many of my friends were mixed — where color-blindness was not ignorance but almost a necessity in a too-mixed family. Places where we were aware of each other’s differing religious holidays and welcomed by each others families. Where friends knew the difference between Chinese and Japanese food and knew that as a Filipina, I didn’t necessarily know how to cook either.
These places were not perfect by any means. I’ve been told to go back to China by a biker who almost hit me in downtown San Francisco. I’ve had men whisper into my ear: “I’ve never had an Asian girl” at bars in New York. I’ve realized too late a white boyfriend only seems to date Asian girls who look like me. I’ve had kids stretch their eyes and call me names on the playground. And I’ve read about myself referred to as “tight Asian pussy” on gossip websites in college.
But none of that prepared me for what happens to me on a regular basis in Joshua Tree. The above piece, “The Desert Will Hold You,” is a creative nonfiction piece based on my experiences the first few months living here in 2020 and 2021. While all names and identifying information have been changed (for example, the conversation with the hairdresser was a conversation with another woman in the desert), the exchanges are all real.
It’s a very specific experience to have an older white man tell you he loves Filipina women, a neighbor tell you he loves Thai women (“close enough”), to have a stranger volunteer that his ex-wife and current wife are Filipina, to have someone working at your house feel entitled enough to let his partner run their fingers through your “beautiful black hair,” to be constantly asked if you live on Base. The latter happens less and less, as many younger transplants of non-white descent (or of white descent, from more diverse areas of the country) have moved to the area in the past couple years since I’ve been here. But the former, well, one of those things happened while hanging my own show at a local gallery a couple weeks ago.
A friend recently told me he was at a poetry reading when author joked: “if only we could all grow up being California Asians.” I laughed, because I knew what he meant. It wasn’t until I moved to the East Coast that I was fully aware of my Asianness, that it was so strongly pointed out, shoved in my face, fetishized. Growing up in California, it wasn’t so much a thing. Now that I’m in a different part of California, let’s just say I’m realizing my privilege.
Fetishization is a charged thing to talk about. When so many people of color are primarily met with aggression and violence because of the way they look, I often feel self-conscious about complaining that someone desires me. But the fact of the matter is fetishization is not a compliment — it is sexual violence and it is dehumanizing. It reduces a group of people to their perceived sexual utility, strips them of their personality, all while implying a different group (e.g., women of the non-desired race) are not as valuable, and in all ways enforces the grossest structures of patriarchy. It honestly makes me sick.
I look at my peer group here now, going on 3 years in, and there are many people of Asian descent. We’ve joked more than once at how we all found each other. Maybe because we also all moved here during the rise in Asian hate, maybe there is safety in numbers. For the first time in my life, I often find myself craving the safety that comes with not being the only person of color in the room.
Emergence: Mojave Artists of Color Collective
My painting, “adding my color to the desert (self-portrait)” is now on view at Compound YV as part of “Emergence: Mojave Artists of Color Collective,” the first group show of an intergenerational-collective made up of artists of color in high desert. The painting examines the above themes of loneliness, isolation, sense of self and sense of place — of what colors get included and if those colors add or take away from the larger palette. The composition is primarily desert colors, with an intentionally bold and solitary dash of turquoise, representing me. On first glance, it looks out of place. But removed, well — I’d venture to say the palette becomes boring. Like all my work, the intention of this painting is broader than a personal self-reflection: it is a charge for you, for anyone, to boldly and fearlessly shine their color, regardless of where they find themselves.
I am delighted to have it shown right next to my painting, “speaking to my ancestors, stars in the sky,” allowing the two to be in direct conversation. “speaking” is a painting done in my favorite color — aqua blue — the color of water in the islands of the Philippines, where my family is from. The placement next to “adding my color” makes the solitary turquoise brushstroke is poignant, making the brushstroke even more lonely — or making the brushstroke even more bold.
The two paintings are both available for purchase via Compound YV and will be on view at the gallery through the first week of November. For inquiries, please reach out to Caroline at caroline@compoundyv.com.
Incredible writing and powerful storytelling. Thank you for sharing your gift.
Breathtakingly beautiful pieces!