ALUMNI IN ACTION
Amy Tan: Novelist, Birdwatcher, Icon
By Julia Halprin Jackson
ALUMNI IN ACTION
Amy Tan: Novelist, Birdwatcher, Icon
By Julia Halprin Jackson
Celebrated novelist Amy Tan shares how her love of language blossomed at San José State.
As they flit and fly within arm’s reach of her writing desk at home in Sausalito, Amy Tan counts the species of birds that visit. She’s up to 66 so far.
The award-winning author of the literary classic,“The Joy Luck Club,” discovered her passion for nature journaling following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when the weight of the world felt profoundly heavy. So she turned her attention to the sky. Her practice of birdwatching, illustrating and writing, transformed into Tan’s most recent book, “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” a collection of journal entries, drawings and observations of life, birds and creativity.
Tan honed her skill for observation as an undergraduate at San José State in the early 1970s. Five decades later, she recalls an important moment in one of her English classes. The late SJSU English Professor Franklin Rogers assigned his class to write down all of the images that came to mind after reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” Tan, who created her own major with a mix of English and linguistics courses and enrolled in seven classes a semester, found Rogers’ approach refreshing.
“In the case of ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ the images had a lot to do with light and dark,” says Tan, ’72 English/Linguistics, ’73 MA Applied Linguistics, ’02 Honorary Doctorate. “I remember the emergence of Hester coming out of the dark and walking through the forest, past a row of trees. Even now, I see the shadows of soldier-like trees flitting across her. It was so eye-opening because I realized that’s how I respond to fiction — through subliminal aspects of a scene that were very visual and imagistic. I realized that was a great way to think of writing: Think of images and how they build upon one another and transform. That class at San José State was very instructive to me.”
A finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the International Orange Prize, Tan is the author of seven novels, two memoirs, two books for children and “The Backyard Bird Chronicles.” Her work has been translated into more than 35 languages. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2022 and awarded the National Humanities Medal by former President Joe Biden in 2023. But she couldn’t have predicted this meteoric rise in literary celebrity during her days at SJSU.
A quote from “The Joy Luck Club” is immortalized in the SJSU Diaz Compean Student Union. Photo: Julia Halprin Jackson.
Every summer, Amy Tan returns to the Community of Writers conference in Lake Tahoe. Photo: Julia Halprin Jackson.
Discovering a love for words
When Tan, who was born in Oakland, arrived at SJSU with her then-boyfriend and now husband of 50 years, she envisioned becoming a professor of linguistics. After completing her master’s in linguistics at SJSU, she was accepted to a doctoral program, first at UC Santa Cruz, and later at UC Berkeley. She left academia after the sudden murder of her roommate, who inspired her to shift directions.
“Linguistics is very compatible with being a writer,” she says. “It’s a love of language and how language is used, as well as the imagery, history and sociological import contained in words. It is wonderful.”
Tan’s dexterity with language came in handy when she transitioned out of academia and worked as a freelance business writer, copywriting for industry giants like IBM and AT&T as much as 90 hours a week. It wasn’t until she was on vacation and received a cryptic message that her mother was sick that Tan recognized a core truth: To give her life meaning, she was compelled to write fiction grounded in her own experience, which meant learning more of her mother’s and grandmother’s past.
She traveled to China with her mother and began writing stories in earnest — stories that later laid the groundwork for “The Joy Luck Club.” The beloved novel tells the stories of Chinese women living in San Francisco and their relationships with their American-born daughters, inviting readers in through an apartment window to watch four families gather to play mahjong and discuss the stock market. Each story plays with time in distinct ways, zooming into a matriarch’s path out of China, and then to one grandmother’s experience living as the fourth wife to a wealthy man. A masterclass in language, character and setting, “The Joy Luck Club” opened doors Tan never expected.
Tan's illustrations from "The Backyard Bird Chronicles" are provided courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf.
Seeking emotional truth
When the novel was published in 1989, it spent 40 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, attracting attention that caught her unprepared. As a woman writing an American novel that centered Chinese American daughters, mothers and grandmothers, Tan felt a sudden and unwanted sense of responsibility.
“I was handed the mantle of responsibility that I didn’t quite know that I could handle,” she says. “I constantly found myself saying, ‘No, this is not representational; this is fiction.’ The book was published during a time when people were trying to find literature that could right the social wrongs that had been [committed] in the past, especially in stereotypes and underrepresentation.
“I had people praising me for writing about their lives, characters that they could identify with, while others said, ‘How dare she write about people speaking broken English? That’s not how we speak in my family.’ But people didn’t understand. There’s no way one book can satisfy the emotional, sociological and psychological needs of many different people from different backgrounds.”
As Tan navigated the international spotlight, she discovered the true pleasure in writing fiction — exploring the universal emotional truths inherent in families, especially between daughters and mothers. Her storytelling paved the way for generations of writers to come.
“There’s no way one book can satisfy the emotional, sociological and psychological needs of many different people from different backgrounds.”
— Amy Tan
Amy Tan's debut made waves at SJSU in 1991. Headline reads "SJSU grad's second book tops bestseller list." Source: SJSU ScholarWorks.
“San José State was a very influential time in the sense that at that stage in life, you end up making discoveries of new ideas that become lifelong pillars of curiosity. I got a terrific education at San José State.”
— Amy Tan
This excerpt of PBS American Masters' "Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir" reveals how she and her husband studied at SJSU.
Following the release of the 2021 PBS documentary, “Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir,” novelist and former Steinbeck Fellow at San José State, Vanessa Hua, wrote that “Tan inspired me and so many others who followed to write the stories that only we could tell.”
Regardless of the nationality or gender of her characters, Tan wants her readers to know that good storytelling speaks to its readers when it is grounded in specificity — everything from the description of a jade pendant to the color of pygmy nuthatch’s feathered head (slate gray). The connections live in the details.
“Even if the outer appearance of a story is fictional, it has to have depth and an emotional component that’s very true, very authentic,” Tan says. “People believe in that specificity of detail, combined with emotion. It makes them feel that this [the story] is their world that they have inhabited, even if they've never been a part of that world. That’s because emotions are universal.”
Watching the right things
Fifty-two years after graduating from SJSU, Tan’s life is guided by curiosity and attention to detail. In order to draw a bird well, she says you must first repeat out loud what you see: Black crown, blue eye ring, short beak. The act of telling creates an image in your mind that you can then better re-create on paper, just as the practice of recalling literary images from a powerful book can strengthen a writer’s voice. Birds and characters alike contain entire stories in images, real and imagined.
“Watching and observing birds and writing fiction have influenced each other for me,” she says. “It’s not just that watching birds has helped me write fiction, or that writing fiction has helped me become a better birdwatcher. [Both are motivated by] an intense curiosity where I can watch the same thing for a very long time — not just more than five minutes, more than an hour, but for years. I’m able to watch how things develop and change over time and in context to larger issues in history.”
Tan has observed generations of birds nesting in her yard. During our interview, she noticed a purple finch, an oak titmouse and a junco — all within the course of a few seconds. Her birds, like her characters, leave impressions that last a lifetime.
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