Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
Review of Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
“For all that people in power claim to care about looting, it doesn’t seem to matter when it’s museums doing it.”
Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li (2022). Published by Tiny Reparations Books
For awhile, before the slow death of writing Twitter as we knew it before, I found myself seeing this book and author all over my timeline.
And, me being the nosy person I am that likes to keep tabs on the publishing industry’s trends, knew I had to read this once I saw some streaming platform bought the rights to it.
I say one of my strengths as a writer is keeping my pulse on the writing industry as a whole, as I like to see what’s being published. But then I completely forgot about this book until one day I was really bored and diving deep into my Goodreads on what to read next.
So I checked it out at the library way after it was actually released. That’s fine. I ended up reading the entire book in the span of an hour and a half, which isn’t bad because I thought it was a pretty straightforward and simple read.
Books that have shorter chapters tend to go by a lot quicker I find, so it went as fast as I expected it to be. Before we get into the review, I must confess I wasn’t into this book as much as I expected. Let’s dig into why.
Chinese American students and friends decide to steal back Chinese art for a lot of money.
The premise of Portrait of a Thief is a fun one: a group of Chinese Americans, all around the same age (college), are brought together to steal back certain artifacts from the world’s most prestigious museums. Some of them know each other a little too well beforehand, others are complete strangers.
There’s an entire romance subplot that arises out of this, which I thought was kind of corny and forced, but more on that later. Anyways, a wealthy woman in China hires all of them to do this and promises them each a lot of money for what seems impossible.
They each have their own motives and backstories, which is explained throughout the book. I’d say the protagonist in this one is mainly Will Chen, who studies Art History at Harvard.
He’s the stereotypical good student with a lot of charm to back it up, and it is expected he is going to get a job at a museum like the MET. However, he’s got a dark side to him: he hates the fact a lot of these museums feature stolen Chinese art in their halls, and would do anything it takes if presented the opportunity to give them back to his ancestral country.
The other characters appear here and there. There’s Lily, an engineering student at Duke who has a strange part time hobby of racing cars. Her roommate is Irene Chen, who is known for her wit and ability to talk to anyone and essentially distract them to the point of getting whatever needs to be done in the background done.
Daniel, who seems to have a knack for stealing and whose father happens to work for like the FBI in the stolen art department (how convenient of a plot point here. Seems a little too convenient at times). Then there’s the romantic interest in New Yorker-turned-Silicon Valley software engineer Alex.
So this group sets out and tries to steal all the artifacts. Throughout the book, it becomes remarkably obvious through the writing that none of this should succeed since it seems pretty amateur. I was genuinely so confused at how this worked at times because of fact some of this was genuinely described in a way that made me question the entire plan.
Yet, somehow, they continue to succeed all the way up until they enter the MET, where they finally get arrested and busted for the art theft they’ve been doing. And of course it’s the one guy’s dad who ends up finding them. How convenient—doesn’t seem like a conflict of interest at all.
It’s also a little convenient that they made friends with the other group stealing Chinese artifacts—having some more drama between them could have really spiced this book up. Maybe the television version will delve deeper into that.
I think there are many merits to this novel. It captures the pressure a lot of Asian-American kids feel not only from their parents, but the people around them. The relationships between these young characters felt pretty real and authentic when they were just sitting around and chatting about life, having little moments to themselves and their hobbies.
That is honestly where the novel shines the most, and I think it did not strike a balance well between that and finding the art heist happening in the background. The romances felt forced to fit an audience that consumes a certain kind of book, which was disappointing to me, and I felt that I began to lose interest in the characters when these kind of plotlines were crammed down our throats as a reader.
Overall Thoughts
I’m somewhat negative in this review, but I think this book had a lot of potential and expectations and ultimately fails to live up to them. I think it needed to strike a balance, as I mentioned before, and then find ways to be slightly more realistic. I get that there is fun in being unrealistic briefly in fiction, but it just didn’t work in this novel for me.
Granted, this is just my opinion, and I think there is an audience for these kinds of books. There is so much appreciation from my end on the representation of Chinese American youths and the unique struggles they face, as well as the critiques on colonialism and the museum as an establishment.
The writing itself is good, but the characters, plots, and themes needed to be more distinguished to make them more memorable versus static.
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