‘Surprised by beauty’: Author Amy Tan discusses birds, books and bravery

Amy Tan really likes birds. Her most recent book, “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” published in 2024, is a compilation of Tan’s journal entries and drawings detailing the bird life in her backyard (as well as a few rats, squirrels and yellowjackets). Tan will discuss the book and other topics at the Fort Vancouver Regional Library Foundation’s Authors and Illustrators dinner on Oct. 6. “I wasn’t going to publish this at all,” Tan said. “This was a private journal. That’s what was so wonderful about it, is that it was purely for me. I didn’t have to worry about imperfections. I didn’t have to worry about a copy editor. We deliberately didn’t change anything.” The book instantly claimed the No. 1 perch on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for over a year. It’s been so popular that bookstores have had trouble keeping it in stock, and good luck finding a hard copy at your local library. But you’ll want to get your hands on one, because the illustrations are so beautiful and, well, funny as heck. Tan’s journal entries from 2017 to 2022 are faithfully reproduced, complete with spelling errors and smudges. The book is a bit like peeking into Tan’s busy mind, as bursting with life as any thriving ecosystem. We’re watching Tan as she’s watching the birds. “It was my editor who said, ‘How about that journal that you’ve been doing?’ I laughed and said, ‘That’s hardly a publishable work,’ ” Tan said. “It’s silly, it’s funny, it’s personal, it’s messy. The drawings, a lot of them are smeared and stained. That’s what’s great. It’s authentic.” I managed to locate a hard copy in mid-August, just before I chatted with Tan by phone. I was nervous to talk to one of my favorite writers. Like the rest of America, I was captivated by “The Joy Luck Club” and read her other novels, including “The Bonesetter’s Daughter,” “The Kitchen God’s Wife” and “The Valley of Amazement,” with the ravenous enthusiasm of a kid scarfing down candy. However, I needn’t have worried. She had me laughing from the get-go. She was warm and surprisingly unguarded. She answered all my questions (even the ridiculous ones) thoughtfully and thoroughly. We talked about books and reading, family relationships, fashion, personal history and preferences, bravery and love, but mostly we discussed birds. And can you blame her? Birds can teach us a lot about life. Or maybe it’s life that teaches us about birds. “I did not see very many birds when I started looking,” Tan said. “There were only three that I could identify, but over time, because I spent so much time looking outside, that was when I began to see how many birds were in the yard that I simply had not noticed.” Tan wonders, in her journals, what bravery means to birds, what motivates them, what they think about and what they might be saying to each other in their own secret language. She expresses wonder at their individual personalities and proceeds to capture each feather, eye, beak and foot in meticulously rendered sketches and color drawings. Bravery in a bird might be hopping onto a moving perch. Tan said that human bravery, though, requires a situation where there’s “a real element of risk to life or sanity or personal reputation or job.” “I have done some things at risk to myself, but I don’t think I’ve done anything that’s heroic,” said Tan, 74. “Publishing my novels, if I’d been aware there was risk, that might have been bravery, because there was some risk in a small way that people would think I was stupid or silly. At this age, I kind of don’t care about that.” Tan is, of course, a master of human observation, acutely attuned to the mingled devotion and anguish of familial ties. Parts of “The Joy Luck Club” arose from her fraught relationship with her own mother, who endured lasting emotional wounds from her early life in Shanghai before coming to San Francisco and marrying Tan’s father, a Baptist minister. When Tan was 15, her father and brother died of brain tumors within months of each other. Tan said the trauma she experienced made her, in time, stronger and more sympathetic. No one hopes for trauma in their lives, of course, but for a writer, Tan said, it may open depths to be explored. Tan’s complicated story with her mother ended with reconciliation — though Tan added that grief can include the loss of the mother you wish you had as well as the mother you actually had. “By the time my mother died, we had a great relationship. I supported her,” Tan said. “Nobody worried about me as much as she had and there’s something comforting about that. It’s like a safety belt that’s going to keep you from flying out the window.” As a child, Tan said she enjoyed fairy tales and Bible stories, both for their violence and their clearly defined moral code. The stories have obvious heroes and villains, Tan said, and “people getting their comeuppance in very dichotomous worlds of good and evil.” She didn’t think of herself as a writer when she was young, she said, but she wrote voluminous letters to friends in which she made up fantastical stories — fledgeling forays into the world of narrative. The grown-up Tan is a consummate artist when it comes to depicting love in all its shades. Like a swan, Tan found her own lifelong love in husband Lou DeMattei. The pair met on a blind date in 1970 at Linfield University in McMinnville, Ore., where Tan was a premed major. (Fortunately for the rest of us, Tan later left Linfield to study English and linguistics at San Jose State University.) After 52 years of marriage, she and DeMattei are deeply familiar with each other’s habits and can finish each other’s sentences, Tan said, but extreme proximity doesn’t always translate into the ability to see clearly: “As an observer,” Tan said, “you have to be distanced but at the same time compassionate.” Which brings us back to Tan’s avian obsession. Tan’s Bay Area home has a wall of windows separating the yard from her living space, where the dining room table provides an ideal look-out into the wild green yonder. Just outside the window, she said she’s constructed a sort of reverse catio — an enclosure designed to entice birds but keep out cats and, less successfully, rats. “It’s kind of like a funny little challenge,” Tan said. “It’s not quite the Hatfields and McCoys. We have back-and-forth ways that we outmaneuver each other. Rats 2, Amy 1.” Tan travels frequently but enjoys the comforts of her own nest. In sartorial matters, she’s a fan of vintage Isaac Mizrahi, though she said she was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie for our interview. This small revelation made me like her even more — that and the fact that she was a vocalist for The Rock Bottom Remainders, a charity rock band with (at various times) Dave Barry, Stephen King, James McBride, Mitch Albom, Barbara Kingsolver, Matt Groening and Roger McGuinn, among others. Tan is, in addition to her other talents, an accomplished musician who trained to be classical pianist before deciding, instead, to compose on a keyboard of letters. Naturally, I wanted to know what books were currently capturing her attention. She said she’s reading Dave Eggers’ “Contrapposto” as well as Ed Yong’s “An Immense World.” She reads fiction and nonfiction at the same time, she said — nonfiction for when she might get interrupted and fiction when she has larger chunks of time. She’s also looking forward to reading Len Howard’s 1950 book, “Birds As Individuals.” Howard’s observations are “right up my tree,” Tan said. After endless, absorbing hours of bird-watching, Tan sees each bird’s strategies and quirks as nothing less than distinct personalities. When I asked what she was most looking forward to in the next six months, she said spending time at home with her wild companions. “There’s something to see that’s different every single day. It’s beautiful and magical and surprising,” Tan said. “I do think that one of the great components of joy is to be surprised by beauty. I have that every day. You’re caught by it and you just feel so lucky.”

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