But beneath the glitz, this is a story of desire and youth the responsibility to honor parents’ struggles and make parents’ sacrifices worthwhile and the qualms of college students on the precipice of the real world, searching for a path that will fulfill them and the question of home, especially for the children of immigrants. The novel is seductive, drawing readers in with stories of beautiful people, expensive art and first-class flights. Starting in the fall, the story winds through college campuses as the crew members get closer to their impending graduation and the real world.
Together, they paint a mosaic of Chinese American experiences. Daniel immigrated with his parents as a child, Will and Irene spent summers in China with family while growing up, Alex grew up above her grandparents’ New York Chinatown restaurant and Lily had little connection to China. And still these characters are fully fleshed out, with different relations to their Chinese heritage. It is evident where the author finds herself in her characters: Li grew up in Texas like Lily, went to Duke like Irene, and is now at the Stanford School of Medicine like Daniel.
The novel varies in narration, talking from the perspectives of all five members of the heist crew. If they succeeded, the group would be awarded 5 million dollars: enough to pay off their student debts, family medical bills and ultimately secure their futures. Inspired by the true story of a spree of heists beginning in 2010, the novel follows five college students hired by a Chinese benefactor to steal five priceless sculptures from various art museums and return them to China, where they were stolen centuries before. Li writes of wanting something intangible, of connections to unseen foreign lands and of trying to honor immigrant parents. All of this was there in spades, but the part of this book that stuck with me was the deep exploration of the Asian American experience.
’23 debut novel, I was expecting tales of ski masks, getaway cars and run-ins with the police. When I started to read “Portrait of a Thief,” Grace D.
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