Cover image of "Portrait of a Thief," heist novel.

Between 2010 and 2015, dozens of items of precious Chinese art and antiquities disappeared from European museums. They were among the estimated ten million artifacts stolen from China during its century of humiliation from the first Opium War (1839–42) through the Japanese invasion of mainland China (1931–45). Despite intensive and protracted investigations involving the FBI, Interpol, and European police, the Great Chinese Art Heist remains unsolved. It’s the subject of Grace D. Li’s highly entertaining heist novel, Portrait of a Thief.

The thieves? Five college students.

Li’s story revolves around the five overachieving Chinese American college students recruited for the caper. Their charge is to steal back five priceless items plundered by foreign troops in 1860 when they sacked and burned the Old Summer Place in what was then called Peking. The artifacts are sculptures of the five signs of the zodiac missing from those in Chinese museums. A billionaire Chinese tech entrepreneur offers them $50 million to return the items to her. And that’s an offer none of the students can afford to refuse.

Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li (2022) 384 pages ★★★★★

Photo of objects stolen in April 2012 from Cambridge University like those taken in this heist novel
Objects stolen in April 2012 from the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University. Image: Cultural Property News

Five compelling children of immigrants

All five students are children or grandchildren of immigrants. But they represent great diversity within the Chinese diaspora, living in far-flung cities around the country, growing up in varying socioeconomic circumstances, and possessing sharply contrasting views of their parents’ homeland.

  • Will Chen is a fourth-year art history student at Harvard. He’s the point of contact with the billionaire in Beijing, the mastermind of the heist.
  • Will’s younger sister, Irene Chen, is a junior studying public policy at Duke. The two have a complicated history in which she has sometimes saved him from the consequences of impulsive actions.
  • Irene’s roommate, Lily Wu, is a mechanical engineering major, also a junior at Duke. She’s from a struggling immigrant family in Galveston, Texas, where she had established herself as an almost unbeatable street racer. She will drive the getaway car.
  • Alex Huang is an MIT dropout with a job as a coder at Google. Her parents in New York’s Chinatown run a successful restaurant founded by her grandparents. But the sign-on bonus at Google was more than her parents made in a year. She and Will had met on Tinder and had had two dates but would never date again.
  • Daniel Liang is the only totally Chinese member of the team. He had been born in Beijing and spoke the language well. He had, however, renounced his Chinese citizenship out of fear that it would make his acceptance into medical school more difficult. He’s a pre-med student at UCLA. Daniel had grown up virtually a brother to Irene and Will Chen. His mother had died early, and his father was often absent on long work trips.

In fact, Daniel’s father plays a central role in the story. He is an FBI agent, the bureau’s only Chinese art theft expert. Those trips he takes are often to Europe to investigate thefts of ancient Chinese artifacts.

Don’t expect a replay of Ocean’s Eleven

A less artful writer than Grace D. Li might have simply taken the essence of Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels and translated it into a series of latter-day heists in museums rather than casinos. But Portrait of a Thief is nothing of the sort. It’s full of surprises which are far more than clever devices to drive the plot along. And this novel delves deeply into the intimate relationships among the five young thieves. It also explores their varying feelings about their relationships to China. In the final analysis, however, Portrait is a clever and suspenseful example of a heist novel.

About the author

Photo of Grace D. Li, author of this heist novel
Grace D. Li. Image: Yi Li – author’s website

According to her author’s website, Grace D. Li grew up in Pearland, Texas, and is a graduate of Duke University and Stanford School of Medicine. Her second novel is forthcoming. She is currently an emergency medicine resident physician at Harvard.

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