Portrait of a Thief

by Grace D. Li

China was many things—traffic and mountains and the brush of ink over paper, emperors and innovation and the heavy hand of an authoritarian government—but she would never call it foreign.

China’s not a capitalist country, Irene could have said, but even she wouldn’t have been able to keep a straight face. This was how China was in the twenty-first century, a ship slicing forward in a vast, infinite ocean, unencumbered by bureaucracy, democracy, any of the other things that pulled America forward, that pushed it back.

“Are you sure?” Irene asked. “Will—well, you know what he’s like. Girls break themselves trying to change him.” Lily thought of ships against dark water, rocks that flashed like knives on a distant shore. She had grown up by the sea. She knew well enough what it meant to throw yourself against immovable things.

“Art belongs to the creator,” Will said, his voice soft, “not the conqueror. No matter what the law says, or what treaties are signed.

“We’re children of the diaspora,” Will said. He had grown up in the US, knew that no matter how much he wanted it to be, China would never be home to him. “All we’ve ever known is loss.”

Her family had survived in New York for two generations, despite gentrification and rising rent prices and a healthcare system that was never kind to the self-employed.

But politics, political office—these things were not won by the best candidate, by the most capable. Irene had always gotten her way, but in this she was not sure if she could. Senate seats could be bought and sold, and white men had decided the fate of this country for hundreds of years. What was the use in dreaming?

It was a story about the West, but it was also more than that. Art and empire, how those in power always took from those without.