Portrait of a Thief
Grace D. Li
Portrait of a Thief
Grace D. Li
This was how things began: Boston on the cusp of fall, the Sackler Museum robbed of 23 pieces of priceless Chinese art. Even in this back room, dust catching the slant of golden, late-afternoon light, Will could hear the sirens. They sounded like a promise.
Will Chen, a Chinese American art history student at Harvard, has spent most of his life learning about the West - its art, its culture, all that it has taken and called its own. He believes art belongs with its creators, so when a Chinese corporation offers him a (highly illegal) chance to reclaim five priceless sculptures, it’s surprisingly easy to say yes.
Will’s crew, fellow students chosen out of his boundless optimism for their skills and loyalty, aren’t exactly experienced criminals. Irene is a public policy major at Duke who can talk her way out of anything; Daniel is pre-med with steady hands and dreams of being a surgeon. Lily is an engineering student who races cars in her spare time; and Will is relying on Alex, an MIT dropout turned software engineer, to hack her way in and out of each museum they must rob.
Each student has their own complicated relationship with China and the identities they’ve cultivated as Chinese Americans, but one thing soon becomes certain: they won’t say no.
Because if they succeed? They earn an unfathomable ten million each, and a chance to make history. If they fail, they lose everything … and the West wins again.
Review
Tracy Hwang
All I needed to know about Li’s book before deciding I absolutely had to read it, was that it was a heist novel centred on Chinese diaspora stealing back looted Chinese art from Western museums. I doubt anyone needs much more than that to get them intrigued, but this book truly surprised me. Some readers may feel that the writing requires a generous suspension of disbelief, but others will find themselves in its pages, and perhaps, like it did to me, this will mean the world.
When it comes down to it, Portrait of a Thief feels like a love letter to the Chinese diaspora experience. It’s a story about dreams and the weight of expectation on first and second-generation immigrants. It’s a story about identity, about finding it, losing it and not knowing it. This book showed me, concretely, that there is a real place for diaspora and their experiences in books, that people like me have a place in the industry. And for that, my gratitude for this story and this author knows no bounds.
This review was originally published via our online
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