Amy Tan seeks peace in the skies
For the writer and artist, observing birds charted a flight path to a more vibrant life
“When I started the Chronicles,” Amy Tan confesses in her latest book, “I could recognize only three birds in my [California] yard.” Six years later, that number had grown exponentially. There are 61 birds listed in the book’s appendix, and these are only, as Tan explains, “birds identified in my yard as of December 15, 2022.” Hence the title: The Backyard Bird Chronicles.
An accomplished writer of fiction (The Joy Luck Club and five other novels), memoirs, and children’s books, Tan came late to serious birding. That interest coincided with her dedication to learning how to draw. In Chronicles, readers follow Tan’s ornithological education while watching the evolution of a skillful artist. Tan provides dozens of her own story-driven cartoons (“Crime Scene! A Murder of a Crow”), beautifully rendered portraits — her golden-crowned sparrow is as regal as her Cooper’s hawk — and naturalist’s jottings. Those last include sketches of the subtly different “faces” adopted by great horned owls, expressions that range from happy and hangry to “mother love face” and “attack human face.”
Recently, Tan sat down with Rotary magazine to discuss the book. The conversation with veteran Chicago journalist Linda Yu extended into the emotional chaos of Tan’s childhood and the ways in which birding offered her insights on how to sustain sound mental health.
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” wrote the reclusive Massachusetts poet Emily Dickinson, “... the little Bird that kept so many warm.” The Belle of Amherst would likely get an enthusiastic tweet of agreement from Amy Tan, the Seer of Sausalito.
The Backyard Bird Chronicles taught me so much. Do you realize what your book has done for birds?
I did not realize it until people started telling me that they had started looking at birds and having these wonderful interactions. The reason why I’m happy about that is that people who love birds will also want to save them, and that means we will have more people concerned about conservation. That gives me such delight.
Seven words in the preface to your book really hit me. Talking about your childhood love of nature, you write, “It was my refuge from family chaos.” Can you talk about that?
When I was growing up, there was a lot of drama in our family. My mother was suicidal. Any little thing would set her off. You could see it on her face. Something was brewing that was unstoppable, and it would burst out: “Maybe I should just kill myself!” We kids would be terrorized. Even though she tried only a few times in front of us, it was enough that we were fearful that this next time would be it.
So sometimes I would go to a nearby creek and play with frogs and tadpoles and lizards and snakes and build forts and slide down the banks and jump into the puddles. This was my escape. It was so complete, being in the moment. The strange thing is I never really looked up to see the birds.
Illustration by Anna Higgie
What part did bird-watching play in healing yourself from the life you grew up with?
It wasn’t so much that I was trying to heal myself when I first started looking at birds. I have had a wonderful life, and I’m grateful for that. But I decided I needed to go to a place that was peaceful. I would be in this beauty in nature, and I would be focused on the smallest details and the patterns. Being in my yard was being in the moment, not thinking of the past, not thinking of the future full of anxieties. Seeing the miracles in front of me and being in a state of awe.
In your book you write that one of your mentors in birding instructed you to “be the bird.” Is that what you did?
John Muir Laws, who was my mentor and teacher for nature journaling, said that when you look at and are going to draw a bird, imagine that you are feeling the life force of the bird. And that’s important: the life force. That’s what gives the bird its ability to be there in front of you alive.
I’m a fiction writer, so I took that advice a step forward, which is to be the bird. Imagine I am the bird looking at me. It is this practice of imagination of being the other. And to me, that is the closest thing we do to compassion. When you’re compassionate, you are imagining the life of that person and the circumstances, the conditions, all the pressures and the sadnesses and the difficulties. You imagine being in their shoes and having their history.
One of the things people can do to feel better about themselves is to be compassionate toward other people. You realize the universals that we all suffer from — and you get to share the joys.
Did you use the drawing of birds as therapy?
I did not use it as an escape hatch. It was not with any other purpose but the love of drawing. It gave me such deep satisfaction that certainly, if I had depression, if I had anything going on, I could definitely get out of that headspace. It is a different thing to be in your own head for that long of a period of time. Not lonely, but in solitude with your mind and with your feelings. It’s a good thing to do something that is creative, doing something actively that is meaningful, that makes something that is beautiful or that’s fun. I think that is something that we don’t do often enough for ourselves.
In The Backyard Bird Chronicles, Amy Tan’s illustrations range from portraits to cartoons to these naturalist’s jottings.
Illustrations used with permission of Amy Tan. All rights reserved.
It might be important to gift ourselves with the understanding that it’s OK to do things we enjoy.
Absolutely. Understanding the many different aspects of life can really alleviate a lot of what makes us depressed, that feeling that there’s no way we can get a foothold on anything in life because something is dragging us down. Take one hour a day — or even just 10 minutes — and say, This is my time for myself. This is my hour to look at birds or read poetry or sew or whatever it is that changes your perspective. And then you realize, yeah, you do have control.
I should say that I don’t have depression now or some mental illness that is impeding my life. But I did have a period where I had all these medical maladies. I felt dull and unmotivated. Not really sad, but just kind of like blah. I thought maybe it’s psychosomatic, but I went to see a psychiatrist, and she thought it was medical. And she was absolutely right. I finally got a medical workup and it turned out it was Lyme disease. When I was treated for Lyme disease, all of this went away that had been weighing me down. But having had that experience, I empathize with people who have those disorders. I know what it feels like now to have unrelenting anxiety.
So is the advice then, if there’s a problem, to keep on searching?
We seek help in many different ways. But at some point it has to be within ourselves. I think that it helps if we can go into that place in ourselves and see if it’s possible to say to yourself first of all, It’s not my fault. But I know that I have to make an effort to help get out of this prison and never give up.
I’ve been with a lot of people also who are in the last days or even hours in their life. And I found that, with a lot of people who are dying, they go into that place and it’s actually kind of a wondrous place.
That happened at the end of your mother’s life, didn’t it?
Yes. She was in her second year of Alzheimer’s. She hadn’t been able to use a phone or a TV remote or to write for quite a while. She had lost her ability to speak for the most part. She called me up one day and I was shocked to hear her. She was absolutely clear, the way she sounded before she was sick. And she said, “Amy, Amy, I’m having a hard time. I’m really confused and I’m scared. I’m losing my mind and I don’t know what this place is. I just want to tell you before it’s too late that I’m sorry that I did things to hurt you when you were little.”
And I said, “No, no, no, you didn’t, you didn’t do anything. You don’t have to apologize.”
She says, “No, I know it’s true. And I just want you to forget like I’ve forgotten.” And that was the most healing thing that I could have gotten because suddenly it took away all the pain of the things that had happened in childhood.
In The Backyard Bird Chronicles, Amy Tan’s illustrations range from portraits to cartoons to these naturalist’s jottings.
Illustrations used with permission of Amy Tan. All rights reserved.
That’s so beautiful. Thank you for telling us that. Now, in your book you write about the sounds that birds make. You talk about the clicks that hummingbirds make and the cry that California quails make. I read what you wrote, but I want to hear it. Could I?
Oh God, I cannot imitate birds. For one thing, they have a syrinx and we have a larynx. They can produce sounds that we can’t possibly produce. However, I’ve discovered that you can imitate the intonation patterns of birdcalls and birdsongs, and some of the birds will actually recognize it. So my call to the hummingbird is just the intonation pattern. If I do that enough times, the hummingbird will answer back and then come to me.
What’s your favorite bird sound?
It’s the great horned owl. We had owls living in our backyard oak trees for about eight months. It was a mother and a son. The mother left in October, which was expected — she’d finished training him — and the son left in April. But the son came back with a girlfriend in October or November. They courted and did things, but we knew they would leave. We didn’t have any nests they could take over. But the other day, the girlfriend — we call her Moon Lady — came back, and she was there all day long. We were so delighted.
I love watching your smile when you talk about birds. It’s beautiful.
I saw a new bird a few days ago that’s basically never seen in a backyard. It hides in scrub bush and poison oak up in the headlands. It’s a wrentit, and I saw two of them, wandering, exploring feeders, just standing, bathing. It is so unusual.
And guess what? It makes me really happy. Any little problem I have, all I have to do is go out and look for those birds.
This story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.