Among my favorite pieces of writing by Amy Tan is “Mother Tongue,” a pointed look at how language can both reveal and conceal. First published in 1990, the essay is included in Tan’s 2003 nonfiction collection, The Opposite of Fate, and it is remarkable for offering a different take on a familiar theme. The subject is her mother, who also inspired the author’s 1989 breakthrough novel, The Joy Luck Club. But here, it is language that centers the narrative. “Language is the tool of my trade,” Tan writes, referring to both her mother’s pidgin vernacular and her own process of code-switching between the language of home and a more standard or formalized American usage. “And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.”
A similarly broad approach emerges in Tan’s third work of nonfiction, The Backyard Bird Chronicles. The book, Tan suggests in its preface, is “a record of my mindset as the ‘unreliable narrator’ on behalf of my backyard birds.… When I started the Chronicles, I could recognize only three birds in my yard. What I did not lack was intense curiosity, and I have had that in abundance since childhood. That is also when my love of nature began. It was my refuge from family chaos.”
Childhood, it should be said, is also when Tan began to draw.
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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In that sense, The Backyard Bird Chronicles represents a return of sorts, to a space where the written word is one, but not the only, part.
Tan makes such a distinction clear from the outset. Throughout these pages, which are divided into dated entries—like, well, a chronicle—she includes precisely rendered drawings of many birds as well as rough sketches accompanied by handwritten field notes. In the first of these sketches, we see her open palm as a hummingbird rests within. The page is dated—“Sept 16, 2017, 1:30 P.M. Sunny but windy”—and titled “A Bird in the Hand.” In her note, Tan describes the bird dipping its bill into a nectar feeder while continuing to flap its wings. “It felt like a fan blowing on my palm,” she reports. “Then it landed and I felt its scratchy tiny feet.… Two seconds later, the hummer and I were divebombed by another male, and my bird in the hand was gone in half a second. It was enough. I am in LOVE.”
Love, of course, is a complicated matter, as Tan well understands. Throughout The Backyard Bird Chronicles, she observes not only birds but also their predators. “It’s not just raptors, wind turbines, cars, window strikes, poisoned rodents and hunters that kill birds. Squirrels, rats, blue jays, crows, cowbirds and others eat eggs and nestlings,” she acknowledges on May 4, 2019.
This is nature, then, with all its dangers, which becomes a subtle shadow as the book goes on. By March 9, 2020, after all, Tan—like many—is facing an imminent COVID lockdown, which gives her bird-watching a new immediacy. “Almost everything,” she writes, “seems like a potential transmitter of disease and death—the groceries, a doorknob, another person. But not the birds. The birds are balm.”
A balm, yes, like The Backyard Bird Chronicles, which is a reminder to stop, to notice, to slow down: to live each moment in its time.•
Join us on Thursday, September 18, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Amy Tan will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest John Muir Laws to discuss The Backyard Bird Chronicles. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
