Book Thoughts: Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
After I read a book, I generally email my thoughts or notes to a friend. I'm now copying these first emails to this blog since it's easier to revisit.
Original Sent Date: May 6, 2025
This is one of two of my book club books for this month (the other being Decolonize Museums by Shimrit Lee with Bhakti Shringarpure). I read it in like a week, which is very fast for me, on account of it is so nothing.
(As for last month's book which was about Palestine, I'm taking notes on it and may not send that for another few months at this rate.)
This book was paired with Decolonize Museums because it's about Chinese-Americans stealing back art from famous museums for China. And well, that's literally all it is. I do not have very many good things to say about this book. It's someone's debut and you can tell, as in, the writing style is pretty atrocious and repetitive.
This book is organized into the viewpoints of each of the 5 characters on random rotation, except not really since it's not in first person. So instead the same annoying narrative style permeates every chapter. I did not bother to count to see if any character got more chapters / pages than the others but I would not be surprised.
As for an example of the narrative style, it's like constant telling and not showing, like when you open up a fanfic and they want to just cut to the chase of summarizing past events. This could have maybe worked if it was limited to Will, the most pretentious of the characters, but it's everyone. It's just stuff like:
Character A knew what it meant to live through loss. An event that made them feel loss. The sun as it dips below the horizon. What could it mean to live through loss? Character A wasn't sure. They breathed out and thought about how everything could change.
ONLY THIS IS EVERY SINGLE CHAPTER
Anyway, despite the characters having different upbringings... ish... I mean they at least have a distinct voice in dialogue — this makes them all sound the same. I cannot actually remember details of where Lily grew up because of this. In fact, only one of them (Daniel, the most compelling character) gets any real relationship with his parents fleshed out, and for the rest of them their parents and home life is just abstracted into "If you know, you know. Asian parent immigrants, amirite? The crushing weight of their expectations. It's all the same so we don't need to actually flesh out individual family relationships." It's lazy. My parental trauma cannot just be summarized like this, regardless of how "prevalent" it is in the East Asian-American community. Having all 5 of your characters have this exact problem just reeks of this author does not actually socialize with a lot of people outside of their specific clique. Maybe that's mean of me and reading too much into their life. Very possible. However, this book was conceived of in college and every single character is a college student and everyone besides Daniel and Lily starts with 0 experience at their heist jobs. What can I say.
The lack of experience thing was really getting me. Alex somehow becoming a hacker when she was only a software engineer with 0 background mentioned in tinkering with systems was pretty unbelievable to me. The writer also clearly doesn't know much tech hack stuff because it basically boiled down to "wrote some code, logged into the the Wi-Fi and then somehow did hackery things" and the reason this is okay is because they just want us to believe that Alex is the character that can do the impossible just because other people said so. The characters all managed to continue living their college lives while doing all of this prep work also, which was similarly nonsensical to me on account of a lot of this being New Skills. Will somehow pulling off a good enough lookalike bronze work of the things they need to steal when he was only a painter before on his first try also seemed kind of bonkers to me! It should not have been his first work! Why was it his first work and why didn't he also have a history in sculpting? What is the point of this, besides to be like ooooh these people are soooo good at things. They're almost like, perfect (word used to describe Irene and Will on like 5 different instances). Don't you know Irene and Will have never failed at anything before. In case you forgot let's remind you a billion times how untouchable they are until they mess up.
Whatever, man. It gets some points for not doing a super duper fantastical break-in method and points out correctly that the main issue with museum stealing isn't getting in but getting out. However, everything else just feels underbaked. I couldn't even really believe the characters' motivations for even getting involved in this stuff in the first place. Will getting a Chinese note when he happens to be there during someone else's heist, while they're trying to get away, but what was printed wasn't the equivalent of Ryakuji or anything (extreme shorthand form of Kanji, I don't know the corresponding thing people do for Hanzi), it was every character written out right? Come on man, someone's standing around there wasting their precious seconds to observe Will stealing on the fly and then writing out a note in full Hanzi? Anyway, this is an extremely small detail to get caught up in and I'm sure the narrative probably meant to say that they did some sort of shorthand with it being "messy". Just knowing the amount of time it takes to write 8 English letters vs 4 characters, I was like, they have got to be working with shorthand here or they're not really concerned on getting out at all.
Anyway. Alex and Lily's reason for being involved was pretty unbelievable to me. Daniel and Irene both do it for Will, which was an extremely lukewarm reason that wasn't very compelling but set up for other mildly interesting character stuff later, but Alex and Lily just feeling "trapped" and wanting to do something else (except they don't really do something super different in the end. I mean Alex becomes a college student again instead of doing her Silicon Valley job and Lily does? I have no fucking clue, man. She should become an actual F1 racer). Doing something different doesn't mean that you have to risk getting arrested. Do we really think that leaving a job is the same thing as sitting in prison? How was this risk calculus even remotely plausible? They needed something more. And individually different. I don't buy it.
Romance-wise it was nice to see Alex / Irene be more spicy (enemies-to-lovers in terms of trope speak) as the gay relationship than Lily / Will but like... Man is Irene kind of insufferable. I liked her enough in the roster of characters but what did poor Daniel ever do to get stuck with two extremely selfish people as his best friends. Why does Alex have to "prove" herself to Irene but Irene never has to do the opposite. Lily is the only one good at her job and she should've just gotten into professional racing IDGAF
As for the politics of the heist-ing. Yes, museums should return their stolen shit to the proper countries. No, I don't think casting Chinese nepo babies as the vehicles for which this whole book conceit happens is the answer or even remotely good. I get why it might have been thought of to make the resources part plausible, but the Chinese billionaire team goes completely uncriticized for, you know, being billionaires in the first place. Though the team apparently has enough social justice awareness to care about stuff like Black Lives Matter, they apparently do not think it's worth interrogating the billionaire aspect of this other team. Cuz like, ultimately, no matter where in China it ends up, returning stolen things to China = good, right? So that's it, we don't have to think about the rest of it!
Why don't we think of the rest of it? Who gets to own art, anyway? Why does the first nepo baby they talk to (Yuling if I remember her name right) just have priceless art everywhere in her penthouse? Does that not belong to the people? I find it weird that this went completely without discussion. Art gets to be owned by the rich people and their own museums. As long as it's in the right country it's fine. = ????????????
(I don't expect them to solve the politics of capitalism and China or whatever but they should have at least talked about it.)
The solution to all of this is extremely optimistic, also. Just because you leak internal memos museums all over the world return stuff? Unlikely. NAGPRA has existed for how many years now, and Indigenous people can't even get their people's remains back. What makes the timeline different, did China threaten to fire missiles at European allies? Come on, man. Public pressure does not move things that fast.
For that matter, what is the political situation in China for their own museums? Are their museums somehow free of stealing stuff from other people, despite their own history of imperialism? I genuinely do not know and don't really know how to go about finding out. If that is somehow true, though, it would mean a lot for how I think about Decolonize Museums. But it looks like we all don't know!
All in all, an extremely mid book. I have very few good things to say about this.
...
Remembered something else to complain about. They said art was "forever" which is dumb. Literally nothing lasts forever. Saying otherwise is just copium.