Portrait of a Thief

by Grace D. Li

Who could determine what counted as theft when museums and countries and civilizations saw the spoils of conquest as rightfully earned?

What was at home? The weight of her parents’ dreams, the judgment of that small town. The looming shape of her future, pressing down on her more with each passing year. Her parents never said that they expected more from her, but it was there in the air she breathed, the history held in her bones.

She was only a few years older than Daniel, but family money and a searing, recognizable ambition meant that he looked at her and saw someone who might have been a distant cousin, who might have been as far away as the moon.

behind a restaurant cash register, homework spread out before her, waiting to hear the telltale bell at the door or a shout from the kitchen.

tech had always been that for her—a new language, a new opportunity, everything in her world opening up.

Alex leaned forward, pressed her hands together, thought of the weight of her family’s dreams, how it could drag her under.

I want you to take back what the West stole, Yuling had said, but Alex had lived in the West her whole life, and New York City was more hers than Beijing had ever been.

Alex drew in a rapid breath. She had thought she knew wealth. She lived in Silicon Valley, after all, had grown up in New York City. She had seen the carelessness with which classmates and coworkers talked about trips to foreign countries, bought clothes and coffee without budgeting. But there was the kind of money that Alex dreamed of, that Alex made—the kind that, even now, did not feel like quite enough—and then there was this. Fifty million dollars. There were five of them here. Ten million dollars each could buy everything her family needed, more.

The girl who spoke was on the couch opposite Alex, positioned in the kind of way that made Alex think of magazine spreads, all elegant lines and an imperious red mouth, eyes that were dark and luminous. Her voice—she had been the one who asked Yuling Wang, so carelessly, about leaving this job behind. “Fine,” Will said. “Will you introduce yourself, at least?” A slow, pleased smile. “My name is Irene Chen,” she said, and of course this was Will’s sister.

a heist crew’s archetypes—leader, con artist, thief, getaway driver, hacker—she

Alex looked at the city spread out before her, reflected glass and brilliant, blinding light, everything that these coming weeks might hold. She had grown up in a run-down apartment in New York City, in a neighborhood that was always fighting to survive, had always known how much it took—how much you had to risk—to change a life. She had been the first in her family to go to college, the first in her family to dream of something more than this. Alex had spent her whole life achieving the impossible.

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.

she leaned against a marble column, watched the careful movements of her brother’s hands, thought back to years ago. A dimly lit art studio, she and her brother side by side. Their parents had signed them up for so many classes—art, music, more—in the endless quest to make them well-rounded individuals, to discover their passions. Irene had gotten bored of art class quickly—she had never liked anything she did not excel at—but Will had picked up a paintbrush and the hours had disappeared. For almost a year, she had kept going back with him, painted still life after still life of the same bowl of fruit. They had done everything together back then,

Will held Daniel’s gaze. Ten years of friendship, of shared classes and late nights studying and talk of dreams, of who they would become when they graduated high school, college, all the ways to measure a life.

he’d traced his fingers over the inscription at the mouth of the palace, letting the words sear themselves into his skin. A reminder of what we have lost, it said, characters carved unforgiving into pale gray stone. Will had felt that loss, had recognized in it something of himself. Going to China, those few summers that he did, was the only time he felt found.

Loss was the hesitation in his voice when he spoke his mother tongue, the myths he did not know, a childhood that felt so vast and alien from his parents’ that he did not know how to cross it.

He had spent these years searching for what it meant, to be the eldest son of an eldest son, to go to a school that flung open doors, but now it was his senior year and he had not yet figured out who he was supposed to be, how to become.

After all these years, his parents still called it going back, as if anywhere else could not be home. He had spent his whole life trying to make China love him back.

She gestured at the palace, at Beijing. “It feels familiar, kind of, but also new, and I expected to feel displacement, maybe, or anger, and I do, really—but I’m also wondering, I guess. About everything that I grew up without.”

Change, swift and inevitable. The country of so much of her childhood, of her father’s stories, was not the same one she was in now. And yet she studied Chinese politics and Will studied Chinese art, both of them reaching for the country their parents had left behind.

It had been almost thirty years since her parents had moved to America. Her future—it was worth more than the past.

Irene had spent her whole life learning how to be liked, the effect of a carefully chosen word or a smile shared like a secret. She had learned it from Will first, who did not even notice he was doing it, how easily the world gave way for him, and then the rest had been all her own. Twenty years, and Irene knew the truth was whatever she wanted to make of it.

But Irene stared out at the sky, the tumultuous blue of the clouds and the distant, glittering stars, and thought of the future. Perhaps there was just this. The curved, sickle moon. The emptiness of the sky. Her parents, both their children gone for college, a house in Santa Clara that was too big for the two of them. All that Irene had to be. Alex Huang and everything Irene did not know. One month, and they would be elsewhere.

This wasn’t about jobs, really, or even the future. It was about themselves, the fact that they were hurtling toward the end of college and the beginning of the rest of their lives, that they were doing everything right and yet—sometimes Irene was not sure she recognized herself.

Irene was not her brother, had never wasted her time with impossible dreams. There was just her, her limits and her capabilities, everything that she willed to be so. Still, on this flight back to America, to all that she used to be so certain about—she wasn’t sure.

Whatever else had happened this weekend, whatever else might change, in this moment they were just college students on a flight, soft light and pressurized cabin air and the world spread out before them.

Irene turned once more to look out the window, took in the vast, infinite dark, the reflection of the plane in the layered glass. She had spent her whole life doing everything right. This heist, reckless as it was, would go the same way.

Twenty years, and she had never called China hers. How could she when she had never been? She did not know its songs, its roads, its rivers. She did not know the terms of address for kin, the names of provinces, anything that she ought. All she knew was that her parents had left, and that they did not speak of what they had left behind.

She had never minded until now. Her parents had lived through the Cultural Revolution, had come to America looking to start anew. Their parents—her grandparents—had died before she was born, to famine or persecution or any of the countless tragedies that happened in a country in upheaval. Without family in China, with all their friends lost to time—Lily had never needed to ask her parents about why they hadn’t taught her Chinese, why there were no summer trips to unknown provinces. Twenty years, and she was used to being asked where she was from, to giving an answer that felt like a lie.

She could never be Chinese enough for China. She could never be Amer...

“Do you miss it?” Lily asked. “China?” “Always,” Irene said. “How can I not?” Lily had expected that answer. Still, she kept her gaze on the ceiling, the heavy dark. “Even though it’s not yours?” she said. “It is,” Irene said. In the darkness, her v...

For all that she loved it, she had wanted nothing more than to leave. Perhaps her parents had felt the same way about China. She had never let herself ask. She would never know.

All these years, and Lily had never known how to love a place and not leave it behind.

He took notes on each one, marking down the minutes required, how the thieves had gotten caught. What went right and what went wrong. The sun rose outside his window, the Charles River glittering in the distance, and Will began to put together a plan. He was not a thief—none of them were, not even close—but he had always been an excellent student.

“I’ll call back later,” Alex offered. “I know it’s the middle of the day.” “Call anytime,” her grandma said. “We miss you, Alex. You are all of our dreams.” Alex tried to smile. Her parents, her grandma, they were so easy with their love. They made it easy for her too. And yet—as she said her goodbye, as she promised to call back soon, she couldn’t help but feel a little afraid, a little overwhelmed. Her whole family—so many of their hopes rested on Alex’s shoulders.

It was easier to think about the future than the past. It had always cut him open.

If they could do this—if he could do this—he might be able to leave the past behind. It had been a decade in America, of that house in the suburbs that always felt too big, his dad looking not at him but through, as if Daniel could not be bone or blood, enough to hold on to, enough to keep.

Daniel closed his eyes, thought of Beijing and childhood, all that he had learned about art theft without even meaning to. His father’s hand in his, a museum in the rising sun. Whatever else he was, whatever else he wanted—he was his father’s son. He knew how this had to go. “The way in doesn’t matter,” he said. “What we need is a way out.”

Against all odds, despite all that was practical or realistic, this was a crew.

“Ba,” Daniel said. “Son,” his dad said in Chinese, that Beijing accent unchanged. Daniel had friends who spoke to their parents only in English now, years in America forming a hard-broken habit, but he could not imagine either of them ever leaving this language behind.

The house smelled like just-steamed rice, and dinner was on the kitchen table despite the lateness of the hour, wrapped in plastic to keep the warmth in. “You didn’t have to wait for me.” “I had some work to do anyway,” his dad said.

“I think so.” His dad nodded. “Good.” Daniel took a bite of bok choy, the crunch of it loud in the silence. Change ought to be measured like this. The house, the furniture, the scrolls of Chinese characters were all the same, and yet if this had been high school, his dad would have spent the next several hours going over interview questions with him, asking follow-up questions in stiff, serious English until he was satisfied with his son’s answers. The past had never felt so far away.

His father had his new citizenship, his new job, and—what was left? Grief was another foreign country, and Daniel was alone. Recklessness for the sake of recklessness, to chase away the despair of not being enough, a tattoo that burned like the Beijing sun and his father’s palm across his cheek, skin blooming red with broken capillaries.

Will calling heads and Daniel slipping a stolen bronze coin in his pocket because what was one more failure? Nothing could be worse than the way things were. His father the next day, expressionless, as he picked up the coin from Daniel’s nightstand and turned to leave, though Daniel had braced himself for something worse. And then, at the door, a bowing of the shoulders, a slow, trembling exhale. Where did I go wrong? his father had asked. His voice had held only grief.

he might have recorded this like a history, marked each year since they had come to America with a new hurt. Better to leave the past behind, to let it wash over him like water.

There was nothing but this, this interview and his future and the ways in which he might find healing.

The past, the future—neither could hurt if he didn’t let it.

There was so much left to do and never enough time to do it, and tonight she would go home and lie awake in the dark, in her empty apartment, trying to figure out how to be better than she was. If they got caught—she could not let herself think about it. She would not let it happen.

Maybe this was the postgrad life for everyone, these aimless afternoons, the weight of the workweek pressing down on you, these long stretches of all-consuming loneliness. Maybe she would get used to it, after another year or two. And yet Alex was so tired. Of this, of everything.

There were plenty of excuses she could have made—they had never really talked about anything besides art theft, they might not have anything else to talk about, she had so much to do—but even as Alex thought them through, she was sweeping her things into her backpack, pulling out her phone to respond. The prospect of being at work any longer, as her coworkers continued to trickle out, as the sun set and the days and the years kept passing— How about sooner?