In Trump’s racist America, The Joy Luck Club’s Amy Tan turns to backyard birding for peace

SINGAPORE – Chinese-American novelist Amy Tan used to be terrified of birds because of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. The Birds (1963), with its menacing swarm of murderous black avians, was filmed only about 30km from the author’s California home.

But The Joy Luck Club (1989) author began to sing a different tune when politics went awry in the United States. With the election of far-right populist Donald Trump as president, anti-Asian racism reached a fever pitch.

Tan, like many Americans, felt helpless and wanted to retreat. She turned to birding in her backyard and started nature journal classes.

“I was thinking: Don’t fall into depression. Depression is being helpless, you need to find some place where you can recover. I decided to go into nature and do something that was about beauty, not something ugly like hatred or racism.”

Today, Tan can identify 66 birds in her backyard – situated amid four Pacific live oaks with overlapping canopies – and is chirpy about recently spotting a great blue heron.

“It’s shocking because that’s a bird found by water where it can go fishing. Plus, the great blue heron already looks like a dinosaur. It’s a fabulous bird to see in your yard.”

Her newest book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, began as a private record of what she saw during those dispiriting years and was never meant to be published. But Tan’s editors convinced her to compile a book drawn from across nine of her personal journals.

The book, replete with Tan’s dynamic sketches, is accompanied by her signature novelistic observations.

The 72-year-old tells The Straits Times from her loft in New York that birding has not left her. Even in the urban sprawl where birds are sparse, she manages to spot gulls, pigeons and a few house sparrows.

“A lot of my trips are based on where I can go birding,” says Tan, rattling off a list of places she has visited – Botswana, South Africa, Hong Kong. Her next destinations are to Ohio – to catch the spring songbird migration – and Raja Ampat in Indonesia.

“The birds in Ecuador and Panama, I mean, I saw 500 birds. They are like surreal animals because of their colours and their patterns are so crazy. If you believe God made this world, then you think – well, did he have an assistant who was a little off their meds when they created these birds?” she says with a smile.

Tan has made a virtue out of staying child-like. Her best tip for beginning birders is to “be naive”.

“Go out there into your yard or your park like you’re a child and see it for the first time. Don’t even say that it’s a bird. Just ask – what is it?”

In writing as in birding, Tan says: “The more that you think you know something, the more you won’t see it. Because you’re just looking at it long enough to confirm what you think you already know.”

Has birding made Tan a better writer? Not really, she says with a laugh. “Mostly because it took away time from my writing, at least my writing of novels. It was a very big distraction, I wanted to just keep my mind off what was happening. I just wanted to look at the birds and take notes and be in the present moment.”

The time commitments of birding aside, Tan had the strange feeling that “the novel was not as prescient” during the era of Trump’s presidency. Her last novel, the historical epic The Valley Of Amazement, was published in 2013.

She is working on a new novel, but says nothing is set in stone as the political landscape is once again shifting.

“We might have another Trump presidency, you know, and who knows how that’s going to affect the novel?” she says. “I think that’s true for almost every writer I know, that their writing is definitely going to be shaped, influenced and governed by whatever is happening politically at the time.”

But a decade of watching birds has transformed her consciousness. She says the theme of survival has been on her mind recently.

“I couldn’t tell you right now what (the novel) would be, except that a lot of what I observed about birds had to do with survival and how much of a bird’s characteristics is geared towards survival and what they will do in the presence of competitors. That’s something to think about with humans too: What will humans do for survival?”

Tan recalled meeting former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at the White House during a state dinner hosted by US president Barack Obama in 2016, where she was seated across from Singapore’s premier. “I said, Mr Prime Minister, I really admire Singapore’s green architecture that you have created in this very dense urban environment.”

With another possible Trump presidency on the cards, Tan feels a certain sense of deja vu. “Back in 2016, it was absolutely stunning because it didn’t seem as though it was quite possible. Now, I think, we all know that – again – it could be possible. I would not be as unprepared if that happened, but I would still be distraught.”

She was, in 2016, one of more than 450 authors who signed a statement against Trump, opposing his candidacy for presidency. “Some people become activists and they protest in very overt ways, but I figured (my way) was to support various organisations at work,” she says.

Now, she also finds solace in the very non-political nature of the birds that her backyard attracts.

Freed of their Hitchcockian horror, the birds now give her an undisturbed, peculiar peace.

“Birds are not political – birds are just beautiful. Birds are little miracles, and that’s what I love about birds. You don’t have to think about elections or anything like that. They’re just there, and they’re just beautiful. They’re funny. They’re very funny, I find, looking at them.”