The inimitable Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania but moved to Paris in 1903. There she joined other literary giants who adopted the romantic role of American expatriates.
Her literary salons, portrayed in Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, are legend. Leading artistic figures including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Pablo Picasso would convene at Stein’s events.
“There is no there there,” Stein wrote in her bestselling quasi-memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Toklas being her partner. The quote is often seen as in reference to her childhood neighborhood, and hints at why she ended up leaving home.
Similarly, in her novel Paris, France, she delivered sharp insights on writers’ battles with a sense of self and belonging. Stein, a gay and Jewish writer embedded in an era that saw world wars and the Holocaust, spoke eloquently on writers who emigrated from their own country:
Everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.
Her own generation of writers found a home in Paris, and the generation before had found theirs in England, she noted.
As for me, I started writing seriously only when I left my California home to Hong Kong after college. That’s where I penned my first book. I consider Hong Kong part of who I am, and I’m certain I wouldn’t have written that book (or my second) had I not emigrated at the time.
Stein touched on this further:
Of course sometimes people discover their own country as if it were the other… but in general that other country that you need to be free is in the other country not the country where you really belong.
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