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Anna Kazumi Stahl’s voice flows through the auditorium as smoothly and powerfully as the shimmering gold of the painting projected onscreen. As part of the Between Image & Word Symposium sponsored by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, and Asian American Literary Review, Anna is one of seven Asian American writers responding to one of the Asian American portraits currently exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery.

Authors were asked to write their reactions to a specific portrait in the exhibition and read it at the symposium. Anna is reviewing “Cat and Carm” by Shizu Saldamando, an oil painting on gold leaf screens of two young women’s passionate kiss.

“The placement of the women creates a movement which manages to de-center, yet proliferate,” Anna explains to the audience. “This is identity as fluid–a practice, not a product.”

Anna’s own history and identity is fluid and multifaceted. Her German-American father, an architect, was fascinated and inspired by Japanese design and aesthetics.

While studying the reconstructions of Kinkaku-ji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion), a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, he met Anna’s mother. They married and moved back to Louisiana–coincidentally, a place where Anna’s mother had research ties.

“My mother had been one of few women to take advantage of post-war loosening of strictures,” Anna says. As a result, Anna’s mother attended university, studying French and American literature in their original languages. Within American literature, she focused on Tennessee Williams, the famous writer and playwright from New Orleans.

Growing up in New Orleans, the city famous for its jazz, cuisine, and festivals, further influenced Anna’s identity and writings. “Day-to-day life was sweetly peppered with street musicians on the sidewalks and levees over the river of bayous,” Anna reminisces. “This public show of the city’s ethnic diversity was a natural outpouring of each segment’s own modes of expression.”

Among the diversity of African Americans, Cajuns, and Native Americans, there was also a small, tight-knit Japanese American community which had been displaced after the internment camps of World War II.

Anna’s multicultural environment was to change even more. While at UC Berkley, Anna applied for a Latin American Studies Summer Travel Grant to include Latin America in her research of exile and migration.

In 1988, without speaking a word of Spanish, she arrived in Buenos Aires to begin her project. Less than five years later, she was conducting dissertation research and already writing fiction in Spanish, her third language.

Learning Spanish was initially difficult. The first few months, Anna took lessons for six hours a day. For several years, she then took a daily class, and then eventually dropped to three hours per week. Fortunately, she was also in a writer’s group for seven years, which honed not only conversational skills, but her creative writing skills as well. She currently teaches Creative Writing with the New York University program in Buenos Aires.

Novels

In 1997, “Catastrofes naturals” (Natural Disasters), her first collection of short stories, was published. In 2002, her first novel, “Flores de un solo dia” (Flowers for Just One Day), was published and nominated for the Romulo Gallegos prize for new Latin American fiction. Her writing often revolves around themes of identity, family, memory, and confronting environments with radically different ways of being. She also touches on subjects such as being a woman, or being the child of people from diverse places and with diverse languages.

What makes Anna’s writing unique among Latin American authors is not merely her content, but also a style that is more direct and shortened compared to other flowery or meandering styles.

“I learn a great deal about how I make stories by writing in a language that prompts me always to remember the value in choosing a word, in listening to a phrase, and in remembering the main structural elements in a text,” she says. “The limitation was generous–the style was removed. What was important was the characters, the conflict–the love.”

To young writers, Anna’s first piece of advice is to Keep the Faith—both in the process and in oneself. She also encourages writers to “Just do it: Differentiate between one’s self and one’s writing, and therefore allow the writing to happen in unexpected, even disagreeable ways,” as well as to accept change. Young writers, she advises, should also enjoy everything, do all sorts of diverse things in life, and read as much as possible of as varied as possible material.

And to people of “mixed” identities, Anna mused that she does not prefer metaphors like “being half” that imply loss of a culture or discrete entities, but instead, “metaphors like layering, and revolving doors, and kaleidoscopic collage effects.” Rather, she says, “Know that identity is a process. Be willing to dismantle one’s own structures of thought. Keep the process open.”

Standing before the audience, Anna finishes her interpretation of “Cat and Carm” and moves to a reading of her own work. In silvery English, Japanese, and Spanish, she reads aloud from “Flores de un solo dia.” She puts her piece down, looks at the audience, and says, “I wanted to do that instead of a bilingual piece…because we’re ready.” Ready for new thoughts, new processes, new environments–Anna Kazumi Stahl and her works foster in a new paradigm of negotiating through multifaceted, sparkling identities.