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- [00:05]
Amy Tan
I discovered that you can imitate the intonation patterns of bird songs and bird calls and some of the birds will actually recognize it. I would also take colored pencils and do very detailed portraits of individual birds that had looked at me and there I was feeling the bird, feeling the life force of the bird, imagining I was the bird. It is this practice of imagination, of being the other. And to me that is the closest thing we do to compassion.
- [00:54]
Linda Yoo
From Rotary Magazine this is the Rotary Voices Podcast, a story of four Chinese mothers who form a club and discover joy and luck. The tale of a lady who lives in the moon and listens to wishes. Why would a murder of crows come to mourn the death of a fake crow and how a brave, tiny hummingbird could coexist with them? These disparate stories all come from the nimble creative mind of of Amy Tan, the Chinese American author whose 1989 novel the Joy Luck Club propelled her into an international sensation. Her best selling book about four mothers from China and their four daughters who grew up in America was such a groundbreaking work that it was turned into a blockbuster movie released in 1993. In the years since, Amy Tan has written more bestsellers including the Bonesetter's Daughter and the Kitchen God's Wife. Children's stories including the Moon lady, based on the traditional Chinese tale of the woman in the moon who grants wishes, and her memoir after she realized writing helped her understand the mental health issues she was experiencing, largely caused by her mother's lifelong struggle with suicide. And Now Comes the Backyard Bird Chronicles, Amy Tan's written observations and beautiful drawings of the birds who came to her backyard and what happened as she spent more time, more energy and more effort in welcoming a growing number of feather messengers into her backyard. Messengers because she learned how spending time with them in nature delivered her from the memories that still clung to her from her traumatic childhood. Given Rotary's focus on mental health and wellness, promoting acceptance and hope through the power of community, compassion and support, I talk with Amy about her new book and discuss her past trauma, her path to find forgiveness, the therapeutic benefits of bird watching, and some practical tips for people struggling with mental health issues.
- [03:33]
Interviewer
So Amy, thank you so much. Your book taught me so much. Do you realize what you have now done with this book? What you have done for birds?
- [03:42]
Amy Tan
Oh wow. I did not realize it until people started telling me when I met them that they had started buying feeders. They were looking at the birds, they were having these wonderful interactions and the reason why I'm really happy about that is that people who love birds will want to save them, and that means we'll have more people concerned about conservation. So that gives me such delight about this book. I know.
- [04:11]
Interviewer
I think more people are wanting to save birds, but think about how many more millions of birds because of you, are going to be fed. It's so terrific.
- [04:20]
Amy Tan
Yeah.
- [04:20]
Interviewer
So I was so touched. When you talk about seeing the birds eye to eye, when they look in your eyes, you look into their eyes. Because I can't forget the day that I watched a hummingbird feed and then all of a sudden it backed up and it turned to me.
- [04:35]
Amy Tan
Yes.
- [04:36]
Interviewer
And it fluttered its wings and for like 30 seconds and looked me right in the eye.
- [04:41]
Amy Tan
Yeah. It's magical. And you just have this instant connection, and it's like falling in love. Yeah, it is falling in love.
- [04:49]
Interviewer
It definitely is. And it's happened to you over and over again, too, right?
- [04:54]
Amy Tan
It has. I have this expression whenever I see a new bird, I call it new bird tachycardia. And then whenever I have a bird that looks me in the eye or does something unusual and acknowledges me, I have a similar feeling. It just hits my heart and it erases any kind of tension that I have for the day.
- [05:17]
Interviewer
Absolutely. Then one other thing you did with this book is squirrels. You have given us a solution.
- [05:28]
Amy Tan
Yes. Well, there are certain feeders you can buy. Of course, I ended up making my own out of grid panels, but I also switched over to hot pepper sunflower chips and also suet. And they took one bite of that and they never came back. I had all kinds of tricks that I was trying to keep the squirrels away from the feeders. You know, it looked like a gymnasium to just keep them away. And they're like Olympiads. They don't even come into the yard, they're in the trees.
- [06:01]
Interviewer
Well, I'm going to go out and buy the hot pepper suet and hope that there hasn't been a run on it because of all the people who read your book. Okay.
- [06:10]
Amy Tan
Well, there are a lot of wild birds in limited stores across the country, so you can even order them from that.
- [06:20]
Interviewer
In the book. In your preface, there were seven words that really hit me. And those words were, it was my refuge from family chaos. Can you talk to me about that?
- [06:30]
Amy Tan
Yeah. When I was growing up, there was a lot of drama in our family because my mother was suicidal. She had seen her mother kill herself. And that is a generational legacy that fortunately has skipped over my generation, me. But growing up, it would be any little thing that would set her off. Maybe somebody said something and she thought it was disrespectful. Or maybe we came late to dinner, or we didn't thank her, or we didn't go to something that she had wanted us to go to. You could see it on her face. Something was brewing that was unstoppable. And it would burst out, maybe I should just kill myself. And we kids would be terrorized. And 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. You can't just dismiss it as a child that she's just bluffing, because sometimes she didn't. So sometimes when things were crazy, she had turned the furniture upside down. I remember at the age of 8 and 9 and 10, there was a creek nearby. And I would go down into the creek and I would play with frogs and tadpoles and lizards and snakes and build forts and slide down the banks and jump into the puddles. And this was my escape. And it was so complete, you know, being in the moment. The strange thing is I never really looked up to see the birds. And I think in part it was because I was nearsighted.
- [08:33]
Interviewer
When I think about this happening to you as a child, you don't know that this isn't normal behavior. You don't know that you could do something about it.
- [08:44]
Amy Tan
I had a sense that this was not normal because we had very close family friends that I grew up with from the age of three. And they were Chinese as well. They were among the people who founded the Joy Luck Club. And the mother was really sweet. In fact, she just recently died at the age of 96. Auntie Janie was the sweetest woman, but her one fault is that she did not know how to cook Chinese food. So, which was great. We could go to their house and we have roast beef and spaghetti or whatever. But instead of those fresh vegetables and fresh fish and all of that, that my mother insisted on cooking. But Auntie Janie was very calm. So I did have a sense that there were other mothers who were not like my mother, especially when I got to high school. And I could see that these mothers didn't fly off the handle, didn't scream and get into fights with their husbands. I asked somebody once who also had a very traumatic childhood, how is it that we ended up not having a lot of mental illness as a result, you know, PTSD or anxiety, depression, all of those things. And she said, because we were smart kids and we knew it was not our fault. I was Always very watchful of my mother to see the little signs of when she was going to blow up. And I think that is in part what made me a writer, being very observant, looking for clues, being observant of human behavior. And, you know, I'm not perfect, but I have a husband who's really great. I can be obsessive like my mother, who would just never let go of something. She would remind me of things I did when I was 8, and I would have been 40 when she told me. But my husband, who's this very gentle soul I was lucky enough to find, will say to me, let it go, Amy. And that's our little secret code that I don't want to go spinning off like my mother. And he'll just say, let it go. And I think, yes, that is exactly what I have to do. And it works. It really works. Sometimes I will say to him, however, let me just get one more thing in, and. But it works. And then we get to laugh because, you know, it's our password for him helping me to calm down.
- [11:24]
Interviewer
So when that happens, do you ever think to yourself, what if I had known that as a teenager and would have been able to say to my mom, let it go.
- [11:33]
Amy Tan
No, no, no, no. If I had said that to my mother, oh, my God, I'd be an accessory to murder. Because that would be something that would set her off completely if I agreed with somebody she didn't like. She was talking about my aunt and felt that my aunt had insulted her. And I took my aunt's side by saying, I don't think she really meant that. That was enough to trigger my mother into a suicide threat. So telling her to let it go, that would be telling her to shut up. And that never would have gone over well. It is a very difficult situation for a child because this is your mother, and you love your mother, but you're also afraid of her. There was nothing I could really say until I was an adult. And when I wrote my book and my mother read the first one, the Joy Luck Club, and she could see that I had actually listened to her, that I understood her. That is, when she, on her own, let it go, she would wind herself up and get into this obsessive, angry state. And then she would say, I don't have to tell you, you understand, because you're just like me. So that was really her therapy. I realized later that all she wanted was a witness to her life, the terrible life she had in the past, and then also to understand her frustration her inability to communicate, for example.
- [13:06]
Interviewer
Now, you and I both know that in our Asian community, mental illness is. There's such a stigma. But one of the things that's very important to Rotary as an organization is to destigmatize mental illness, to try to understand it more, to encourage people to get treatment for it. What would you want to say to listeners of the podcast?
- [13:30]
Amy Tan
One thing that I do talk about at times when people are talking about Asian Americans is that we're not homogenous, for one thing, and we're not the model minority without problems, like a lot of people think. We have a lot of family problems like everybody else, and also some that are particular to our community and where our parents came from. In our family, we never would have gone to an outside counselor or therapist. My father was a Baptist minister. But it wasn't the kind of thing where you could confess to somebody what the real problems were. There was always too much of a lightness in talking about how maybe your faith could conquer all. Well, when you're a child, that is not enough. You don't understand the qualities of faith. Faith in yourself as well. Faith in the future that things will change. And so I think we just have to talk about it and say, this is what happened in my family, and if it's happening in yours, speak up. Don't suffer that from that. My mother was in an abusive marriage, and she had no one to talk to about that. They all thought she was lucky to be married to a pilot. So I'm the one who got to hear about this terrible marriage. From the time I was a young child, she would tell me about this bad man, and I had to listen for hours and hours. She couldn't stop. You just wonder if she had had somebody else to talk to, to take her through what she was experiencing and that she experienced it in a PTSD way, whether or not she could have handled it better instead of going out of control.
- [15:22]
Interviewer
You know, as I was reading your backyard bird chronicles, I kept thinking to myself, how did you heal yourself from the life that you grew up with?
- [15:33]
Amy Tan
Yeah, it wasn't so much that I was trying to heal myself from the life I grew up with when I first started looking at birds. I have had a really wonderful life, and I'm grateful for that. I have not been suffering from anything except, you know, every now and then, overwork or feeling a little cynical about certain things. But I have situational depression like everybody else when something terrible happens. We all have these situational depressions. I decided I needed to go to a place that was peaceful, that had nothing to do with what was going on. The outside world. And the antidote to ugliness would be beauty. I would be in the moment, in this beauty in nature. And I would be focused on the details, the smallest details and the patterns. And my whole purpose of being in that place was to be intentionally curious, to notice and ask questions, deeper and deeper questions. And invariably some of these questions would have to do with who I was and what was important to me. And so it would take me into a deeper place as well, where I could examine morality, I could examine aggressiveness or territoriality. You know, life, death, survival. Very important questions that at some level, I think we all ponder. And oftentimes, when things happen that are terrible. The loss of somebody, for example. So this being in the yard was being in the moment, not thinking of the past, not thinking of the future, full of anxieties. It was just simply being in the moment and seeing miracles in front of me. Wonders and being in a state of awe. When you're in nature and you have that kind of attention, you're noticing things, you're putting it together, you're seeing the patterns, you understand it better, you don't understand it completely. The mystery is still there, which is wonderful as well. And so when I think about people who need to have respite from the kind of anguish that they have in their lives, whether it's a mental illness that does require that they seek help for that, or medication that they have, something very complimentary to what they're doing to become healthy. And that is to go into nature and to do that and just to cleanse the mind and go from there.
- [18:19]
Interviewer
That's so absolutely beautiful. As I was reading the book, the part where you talk, one of your mentors in birding was saying, be the bird, because you can learn about a.
- [18:32]
Linda Yoo
Different side of yourself.
- [18:34]
Amy Tan
Is that what you did? Well, what John Mirlaus, who was my mentor and teacher for nature journaling, he actually said, when you look at a bird and you're going to draw the bird, imagine that you are feeling the bird. You are feeling the life force of the bird, and that's important. The life force what gives the bird its ability to be there in front of you alive. And I'm the fiction writer, so I took it that step forward, forward, which is be the bird. Imagine I am the bird looking at me. So you have this conundrum of being the bird and also looking at the bird, but being each other. 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. And you imagine being in their shoes, being in their home, having their history. That's what we do as fiction writers. We write the history, write the situations. And so you have to be. When you're writing fiction, you have to be compassionate. And that, I think, helps me to be more compassionate to other people. I will say also that readers do the same thing. When you're reading a book, oftentimes you become those characters, and that's a good thing. So one of the things that people can do to feel better about themselves is to be compassionate toward other people. And you realize, you know, where all the universals of the things that we all suffer from, and you get to share the joys. You look at human nature and you say, what does our humanity mean? And I think it starts with compassion.
- [20:44]
Interviewer
As I was looking at your book, and when I say looking, it's because I was looking at the way your drawings improved as the years went by and the way that you were drawing. Did you find that as a therapy?
- [21:03]
Amy Tan
I didn't use it as an escape hatch. It was not with any other purpose, but the love of drawing. So once I took these lessons and learned how to do it, it was an obsession. If anything, I would have to stop, because I loved it so much. I would draw these little scenes of the backyard, and then I would also take colored pencils and do very detailed portraits of individual birds that had looked at me. And there I was feeling the bird, feeling the life force of the bird, imagining I was the bird looking at the eye that had looked at me, trying to capture that gleam of life and every single feather, contemplating what the bird needs to do with each bird of these parts of its body to stay alive. And that gave me such deep satisfaction that certainly if I had depression, if I had anything going on, I could definitely just get out of that headspace. We do things with family members, with husbands, children, friends. But it's a different thing to be in your own head for that long period of time. Not lonely, but in solitude. And this is where you're with your mind and your feelings. They're not being buffered by anybody else. You're there. And so it's a good thing to do something that is creative, meaning you're doing something actively to make something that is meaningful, that makes something that's beautiful. Or fun. And I think that's something that we don't do often enough for ourselves in solitude, except maybe when we read. And those, I think, are important activities that we need to gift ourselves with.
- [22:58]
Interviewer
It might also be an important thing to gift ourselves with is to this understanding that it's okay to do these things that you enjoy even though life is busy and there isn't time.
- [23:12]
Amy Tan
Absolutely. You know, I especially, I will have to say, especially among women, we are brought up to tend to others, whether it was from our parents who do that. It's the legacy we've inherited from generations of women. We're the ones who primarily take care of kids. We're the ones who are trying to figure out what their feelings are. And so we're giving a lot of ourselves to other people. And willingly, you know, who doesn't want to give as much as we can to children? But often we don't have any time or a place for ourselves. We think of it as vacation or a little reward. And it shouldn't be a reward. It should be that we simply say, this is mine and I'm going to take it. Now, what I did back in the 1980s, I was working too much, and I was working 90 billable hours a week. I was a freelance business writer, and I couldn't stop working. And this probably had to do with my upbringing of feeling that I had to, you know, give myself to other people. I couldn't say no to these jobs because they would say, oh, you're the only one who can do it. You know, if you could just do it by nine this morning, it's like four in the morning when they call. And I would say, oh, okay. You know, I take this as being my calling in life, but instead, I have no life. And I decided at one point, somebody said to me, you're a workaholic. You should see a psychiatrist. It's one of the few times I actually went to psychiatrists and I'd be talking about all kinds of things. And I really didn't get any advice. Instead, he fell asleep on me three times. And at the end of a few months, I just said, you know, I think that what I'm going to do is kind of a behavioral therapy for myself, and that is that I'm going to do something purely for myself. It has nothing to do with my job or my future or try to rise up to a position, getting better and better in a public way. I'm going to learn how to play jazz piano. And maybe I'll also Try my hand at fiction writing, Writing stories. And then guess what stuck? The fiction writing. Because I unexpectedly found out that through fiction writing, I could have this recognition of what was going on in my childhood and in myself and the thoughts that I had. And understanding many different aspects of life, which the understanding in itself can really alleviate a lot of what makes us depressed, you know, and feeling like there's no way we can get it a foothold on anything else in life, because something is dragging us down. And I think taking that one hour once a week or more, once a day would be great. And just say, this is my time for myself. You can't have one hour a day. Go for 10 minutes and just say, this is my hour to go out and look at birds or to read poetry or to sew something or do some basketball hoops or whatever. It is something that just changes your perspective. And then you realize, yeah, you do have control in some ways. It may start off in a small way, but you do have control. I should say something here that I don't have depression now. I don't have what I would consider some mental illness that is impeding my life. But I did have a period where I had all these medical maladies. You know, I had aches and pains. I just felt dull and unmotivated and not. Not really sad, but just kind of like blah. And I didn't understand. So I thought, maybe it's psychosomatic. So I went to see a psychiatrist. She asked me a lot of questions. In the end, she said, well, I believe you have ptsd, major anxiety disorder, major depression. And then she said, but I think it's medical. And she was absolutely right. I finally went and got a medical workup, and it turned out it was Lyme disease. So I was very fortunate in that when I was treated for Lyme disease, all of this went away. That had been weighing me down. But having had that experience, I so empathize with people who have those disorders. I know what it feels like now to have unrelenting anxiety. I had the feeling I had a knife at my back and somebody was going to stab me. It didn't make any sense, you know. And then a year later, when I had been taking the right treatment, I was in the Middle east, in Dubai and Doha by myself, walking around, and no anxiety whatsoever. And I said, oh, my God, I'm so free. And so I will just say I know what it feels like to be imprisoned by a mental illness. I'm glad in a way that I went through that, because As a fiction writer, you want to go deeper and deeper, and you want to understand your characters, and you only do that by understanding other people. So I've had that. I understand now much more my mother's own mental illness, and that allows me to be compassionate.
- [29:00]
Interviewer
So is the advice then, to somebody who doesn't know or a family member who says there's a problem here, to keep on searching? You know, maybe the first psychiatrist or psychologist you go to, it's the wrong thing, or somebody feels like the diagnosis is wrong, you don't give up. Is that the advice you should keep trying?
- [29:22]
Amy Tan
Oh, yeah. I mean, you can't be guaranteed you're going to get the right therapist the first time out. It's like an editor for fiction. Maybe somebody tells you something, it doesn't quite hit in the place that you need. The advice is not working. So you can take from it what you want and maybe seek help. I think that we seek help in many different ways, but at some point, I think it has to also be within ourselves, because we can't have the friend or the other person with us 24 hours and completely immersed in our thoughts. So I think that it helps if we can go into that place in ourselves and just look at a small part of it and see if it's possible to say to yourself, first of all, it's not my fault. 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. You know, to people who had Lyme disease and felt their life was over, one of the best things I could say to them was, no, your life is not over. It may be a long journey back to health, but there is a path, and just stay with it. It may be slow. You might have big breakthroughs, but you're not completely stuck in a place. I think I've been with a lot of people also who are in the last days or even hours of their life. And there you would even say, here I am. It's inevitable. I can't change his fate. But we still have our minds. 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. So there are these opportunities and steps, but it does come from also within. Remind yourself that you've survived. You know, you survived childhood up to this point. You survived grade school and high school and all of those things. And there are ways that your life can change for the better.
- [31:38]
Interviewer
That happened to your Mother at the end for her, didn't it? She had the moment of clarity so that she was able to say something to you that made such a difference for you.
- [31:49]
Amy Tan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was in her second year of Alzheimer's, I think. 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 could speak Chinese, but not English that well. And she called me up one day, and I was shocked to hear her because she couldn't use a telephone. And she was absolutely clear. It was the way she sounded before she was sick. And she said, amy, Amy, I'm really. 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. And I said, you know, we trying to calm her down and say, you know, I often forget things. I'm often feeling lost and confused. She said, no, no, no, I'm losing my mind. And I just want to tell you before it's too late, that I'm sorry that I hurt you. I did things to hurt you when you were little. And I said, no, no, no, you didn't do anything. You don't have to apologize. She says, no, I know it's true, and I just. I just want you to forget like I've forgotten. And that what she said right there 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. And so this is what I will say to mothers or fathers, the way that you can heal the child you love, even if that child is 50 or older, the thing you can do to really give them a start in healing is to apologize for things they might have done that were wounding. And it's not to say if you felt wounded by what I did, it's to say, I know I wounded you, and I'm really sorry. The flip side of that is for a child to say to the parent, and the child could be 50 and the mother 70, or the child could be 20 and the mother 40. And that is to say, I am glad that you worried for me when I was growing up, and now I worry for you. I want to make sure you're happy. I worry about your health, you know, to have a parent know that their own child worries about them. My mother was delighted when I said that. I'm worried, you know, I. Your health. I thought you had a heart attack during that time that I said that, she had this in her voice. She said, you worried for me. It was the greatest gift. And it's so simple, you know.
- [34:50]
Interviewer
That's beautiful. I just. Thank you for telling us about that. Thank you for that advice, too. I think that's wonderful. So you wrote in your book about the sounds that birds make. And. Yes, you know, I'm reading your words about it. You talk about the clicks that the hummingbirds make. You talk about the cry that the California quails make. And I thought you wrote it out, but I want to hear you say it.
- [35:17]
Amy Tan
Oh, God. I cannot imitate birds. For one thing, they have a syrinx and we have a larynx. And so they can produce sounds that we can't possibly produce. However, you know, I've discovered that you can imitate the intonation patterns of bird songs and bird calls, and some of the birds will actually recognize it. So my call to the hummingbird in imitation of what it. And this is just the intonation pattern. It's. If I do that enough times, the hummingbird will answer back and then come to me. Now, the quail, it's almost like they're a mother who's panicked that their child ran across the street and where are they? And it is like, you know, it's never some peaceful little call that we're all doing great. Aren't we happy? It's always total anxiety. So if you're in an anxious moment, think of yourself as a California quail. The towie. The California towie makes a loud chip, chip, chip. And what it sounds like is the low battery warning on your smoke alarm. So if you feel like you're getting alarmed by things, think about the California towie and the way that it's making these alarm calls. And it'll just make you laugh that sometimes we're worried about things, things might break down. And that's the California towie. It doesn't do that because it's upset. It actually is the call that it makes.
- [37:04]
Interviewer
So what's your favorite bird sound?
- [37:09]
Amy Tan
It's the owl, the great horned owl. And we had owls living in our backyard in the oak trees for about eight months. It was a mother and a son. And the mother left in October, which is. Was expected she'd finished training him. And the son left in April, but the son came back with a girlfriend later on in October, November. And they courted and they did things. We knew they would leave. We didn't have any nests they could take over, and so they left. But the Other day, the. We call her Moonlighty. The girlfriend came back and she was there for a while, all day long. And we were so delighted. So those are the characters that I talk about in the book.
- [37:56]
Interviewer
I love hearing their sounds. I love. And I have to say, Amy, thank you so much because I, I love watching the smile that comes onto your face when you talk about the birds. It's just, it's, it's beautiful. It really is.
- [38:09]
Amy Tan
Thank you. And you know, I always, yes. Have these. I forgot I have these around my neck the moment I get up. I have these very small 12 ounce binoculars and they're excellent binoculars, but they're in a small size so that I can do this and draw. But also whenever I see anything interesting, I immediately have my binoculars and can look. I saw a new bird just a few days ago and it's a bird that's basically never seen in a backyard. It hides up in scrub bush and poison oak up in the headlands. And it's a wren tit. Anybody who knows birds, when I say I have a wren tit, two of them out in the open, a bonded pair out in the open, wandering around, exploring feeders, eating everything there, just standing, bathing. It is so unusual to have that. 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. And then I'm thinking, I am so lucky. I'm so lucky in life. You know, I'm the one who got to see the two red tits and they've been here since June. So I'm very lucky. You are.
- [39:25]
Interviewer
You've taught me from this book too, to keep on learning about it. And I'm probably going to change some feeders now and see what happens. And I'm waiting for the day another bird, whether it's a hummingbird or not, looks me right in the eye. Amy, thank you so much.
- [39:41]
Amy Tan
Thank you, thank you.
- [39:46]
Linda Yoo
This episode of the Rotary Voices Podcast was produced by JP Swenson and and edited by Wen Huang. Production by Joe Dassault and Yoo Su Kim. I'm Linda Yoo. If you enjoyed the show, please rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and share it with your friends. The Rotary Voices podcast is produced by Rotary Magazine, the official monthly publication of Rotary International. Thanks for listening.