Amy Tan finds obsession, connection and endless curiosity in birding

Author Amy Tan published The Joy Luck Club in 1989, and has published nearly a dozen other books since — including novels, children's books and nonfiction. In her latest work, "The Backyard Bird Chronicles," she documents a period of five years through observations about the birds in her backyard — and her growing obsession with birding.

The book is quietly fascinating, and though life and world events — the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, grief, wildfires — seep into the journal entries, it's the birds and Tan's indefatigable fondness and curiosity for them and their world that propel each page. Tan's own illustrations of the birds she observes are delightful additions.

This Saturday, she’ll be speaking in a sold-out keynote address at the San Diego Bird Festival, which celebrates birding and birds in our region. Festival organizers say it’s one of the "birdiest" regions in the United States.

Tan said that detailed observation and journaling about birds is essential to her writing life — and also her ability to cope with grief and a troubled world.

"Every time I do that, I will see something so wonderful and so beautiful that it instantly gives me the kind of feeling I need to have to hope for something better for the future. It's the practice of hope, which is waiting for something good. And that is part of the gift of bird watching," Tan said.

Interview highlights

On her evolution into a birder and authenticity

I think of my life and everything that I write, whether it's a scrap of paper with my daily notes of what I need to do for the day — you know, get accomplished — or grocery list or a packing list or notes on mortality. It's all part of the same thing, and it goes into the evolution of who I am. And it's just that the birds became a more all-consuming activity for me, especially during that time when we were not really doing much of anything. We were not supposed to go outdoors even and so I had, much to my guilty delight, permission to simply sit there and watch these birds and that's all I had to do. So, it's definitely part of the evolution of me and it's reflected in what has now become a book.

That book had to be pried out of me, by the way, by my editor, because I suffer from what's known as perfection syndrome. A lot of people have that. You don't want to show off anything that looks half-done or that has bad mistakes in there, especially if you're a writer. And when he suggested we publish it, I said, "It's a mess," and he said, "Well, that's authentic. That's what we want." I thought, what a great word, you know. If you have anything that's imperfect, if you look terrible in the morning, you know, look at yourself in the mirror and just say, "Hey, I'm authentic today."

On details and memory

I've always been somebody who takes notes. It's almost a requirement for me to write something down because I know I will forget it. When you write something down or you draw it, it encodes itself into your memory. And what I've learned is that this process of drawing and taking notes is also called nature journaling — and it can actually improve your cognition, improve your memory. And I find that to be true.

I suffered a little bit of memory issues when I had Lyme disease, and it was the only way I could remember anything from one minute to the next. Having Lyme disease was like having a little bit of dementia. And so I've seen the value of that — when I write things down, I also pontificate on it a lot more. I consider all the angles, and it becomes a much more useful way for me to take in the different things from the world, thoughts that I have and work them through. And that just then percolates for a long time and it shows up in novels later on — or any kind of writing I do, especially in the form of not just the stories but the metaphors, the images that come to mind.

On drawing and connecting with birds

I think that when we try to reproduce something, we can do it in various ways, like through storytelling by memory, through photography, through a painting, and all of those have their different ways of representing something about ourselves, our perspective of what we saw.

For example, in the book I do a lot of sketches and they look like cartoons, but they're also very funny. So when you see this behavior represented, you know that I'm looking at these animals with a sense of joy, and that they're very endearing to me. I find they're very humorous. And you might not see that, say, in just a photo where I happen to get it when it was in focus.

On being 'besotted'

It was very surprising to me how quickly I became besotted with these birds, and that it came really as a result of not the beauty of the bird or how biodiverse birds are or anything like that. It had to do with the individual. I think it's the same way that we develop relationships of fondness with anybody, with a friend, with a future partner or with animals, pets.

We have an interaction that somehow molds future interactions and our feelings about that creature. So, with these birds, I was also trying not to become anthropomorphic in my interpretation of their behavior because obviously, since I'm not a bird, I cannot know the bird's intentions when it does certain things.

But I allowed myself the idea that I could use that as something analogous. So if the bird is looking at me, if it stays there and it does not leave, does that mean the bird trusts me? Or what does trust mean to a bird? Now, trust, for us as people, it covers many different things including "I will not go around your back and tell a lie about you." For a bird it means basically, "I will not advance toward you and kill you." So it's something quite different. And by accepting me as part of its world, which was my backyard, it could have been just saying, "Oh, you're just like the chair, the patio chair there, the patio umbrella and the little footstool. You're all not going to move and become a danger to me." And that may be the entirety of it.

On obsession and questions — in birding and novels

I've been aware of this personality trait for quite a while — obsessiveness. In writing one novel, I wondered, "Did they have toilet paper back in the 1800s in China?" And then I would do research for the whole day just to answer that question — it was kind of ridiculous because it's not something that's going to go into the novel.

But once I have a question in my mind, I need to know the answer as thoroughly as possible. And I do this same thing with birds. Obviously, there's a lot that I don't know about birds, and so I became very obsessed about knowing many different things. You'll see that in the book I allowed myself to have most of it be questions. You know, what is the bird doing? Is it aware that this other bird is bigger than it is and it's becoming aggressive? Is that a move that it would do on a member of its own tribe?

I kept asking these questions, and the more I asked the questions, actually, the more it opened up my mind to observing even more. And that, to me, is a very important thing that I have to do as a novelist. I have to be intensely curious to know — and it's more important to have the questions than it is to know the absolute answers. The absolute answers would just shut down the whole process of inquiry. So, that is what the practice of bird watching is for me. It's one question after the other.

On vulnerability and grief

I was thinking the other day — the uncertainness of funding of different things, for fish and wildlife, we're losing some programs. I was recalling how anxiety and the feelings we have — despair, anxiety, hopelessness — they have to do with what happens when we wait. When we wait and we feel that only bad things are going to come, that lends itself to further depression, despair and hopelessness. But if we wait for birds to come, if I sit there and wait, and I wait for the bird to land on the fence, then climb up over onto the fence and then they come down into the yard. Every time I do that, I will see something so wonderful and so beautiful that it instantly gives me the kind of feeling I need to have to hope for something better for the future. It's the practice of hope, which is waiting for something good. And that is part of the gift of bird watching, what that has been for me.

Because it immediately sends me to a different place where I cannot be thinking about worries and what might be lost. So if it's with a friend, I can see life, I can see the humor, I can identify with a certain bird that has chosen to arrive by coincidence — or maybe not coincidence.

On reflecting back on 'The Joy Luck Club'

I think there are parts of our lives that come to us at different moments that we never would have appreciated when we were younger. And I think the birds came into my life at the right time. I was ready for it. I was so hungry for it. I look at everything in my life and say, now if this hadn't happened, would I have even become a writer?

There were times when I was younger where I would have wished I didn't have this life. I wished I wasn't Chinese. I wished that I looked — that I had blond hair and big tits, you know. I wished that my mother wasn't my mother. All of these things that we might have wished for when in different points of our life — but that leads up to all the things that made me who I am, and so I don't regret any of it. I wouldn't want to alter any of it.

I wouldn't want to say I want to be a birder sooner in life because that's going to change me in another way. It'll help me grieve for my father and my brother who died when I was 15… it will help me deal with my mother better so that I won't have these certain notions of what a mother and a daughter are to one another. I need to go through that difficulty, and the things that I wrote about never would have come about if I had been a happier, a sadder person, a more nature-enriched person.

It all leads to the evolution of who I was at that moment and when I wrote those things.

On the moment that made her go all in on birds

I will say that probably when actually it became unavoidable, when it became obsessive, was when a hummingbird landed on my hand and started drinking out of a feeder I had in my hand. I thought it was never going to happen. I thought it was a scam to have these little feeders. I thought that maybe it would take months to do and instead it just happened almost right away.

And I'm studying all the feathers on top of its head and saying out loud, "Oh look at these reticulated patterns and they go from small to larger to larger over the back of the head," and I was saying to the bird, "You're so beautiful. You're so brave." The bird just kept feeding and feeding and feeding. How could you not be absolutely crazy about birds at that point?