In a town on the edge of a desert, a holoparasitic plant threads together memories of hardship, dreams of prosperity, and the feeling that development has come to a halt. Following centuries of human–plant encounters, this essay explores how China’s interior frontier has been shaped by successive incomplete projects of land reclamation, industrialisation, and nature conservation. Paying attention to this sense of unfinishedness sheds light on how people today live through political depression in China, where the future feels suspended but not entirely closed.