Grace D. Li

Okay, this book is perfect. It manages to provide a really insightful commentary on colonialism, art, and Western museums along with the complexity of diaspora and identity, and... a heist out of all my heist movie watching dreams. And it's queer? I will be throwing this book at everyone I know.

This book really frustrated me because it had so much potential. I'm writing this a few weeks after finishing it, so I hope I get the details right. It's a "thriller" about a group of college students who are contracted by a Chinese firm to steal back Chinese antiquities from western museums. The group are extremely incompetent and have never done any kind of heist before, but somehow they are offered 50 million dollars ! (imagine Dr. Evil with his pinky up) to get these items back on behalf show more of some Chinese billionaire.

I had some issues with this book. The implausible plot is one thing, but on its own that could have been kind of fun and humorous. My main issues had to do with the characters and the extremely problematic way the theme of museums and their histories of colonialism was handled. (It's a good topic, and one that a novelist should do justice to! In fact, I just read Tania James's novel Loot, and she does a pretty great job, though it's about private collectors, not museums.)

The characterization is an issue that many readers have raised: these five Chinese American college students are all basically interchangeable. It was hard to keep track of whose thoughts were whose, and even harder to care. The characters are bland, indistinguishable, privileged, and don't do much to illuminate the diversity of the Chinese diaspora in the US (they all go to Ivy or near-Ivy schools, for one thing). A few reviews suggest there are some subtle clues about differences in class, language, and city/region of origin, but those are not made apparent to a European American (or presumably any non-Chinese/Chinese American) readership. Also, with the exception of Daniel the characters are all unlikeable/irritating for various reasons, and their motivations are not well developed at all.

But my bigger problem is just that this book is historically and conceptually lazy. It really makes me wonder what they are teaching in the art history department at Duke! (Just kidding, it's an outstanding art history department--but the author seems to have walked away from her education there with a really simplistic understanding of the history of museums.)

First of all, NO, "all" items in western museums are not "stolen"! Many of them were purchased completely legally. Is there a lot of work to do on figuring out which ones? Yes. But to perpetuate this chestnut is really dishonest. Millions (probably more like tens of millions?!) of items in museums around the world were acquired under legal circumstances.

Second, the book does little to differentiate among strata of "illegal" acquisition. For every smash-and-grab job like the destruction of the Summer Palace (the book's subject), there are more complex situations. Please do not lump these all together! It's very possible to make a cogent case for the return of (say) the Parthenon Marbles while acknowledging that the circumstances are VERY different to how the Benin bronzes (on view just downstairs from them) were acquired. It's not like Lord Elgin ran in with a ski mask on and dashed off with 2000 years of Greek patrimony in the middle of the night lol. The Summer Palace and the Benin Punitive Expedition were looting. But many artifacts that were problematically acquired were not looted in the way Li wants you to think they were. It's not all the same. But this book acts like it's all the same.

Finally, the focus on China as a poor-me wronged party was kind of overdone. The Chinese government under Mao and Communism actively sought to destroy its own cultural patrimony. Buddhist temples and unique artifacts were smashed to rubble in the Cultural Revolution--no Britons required. The book also ignores China's historical/ongoing repression against subject peoples. China got off with a major hall pass, while the author assumes all European countries are/were basically evil empires. (I am in NO way justifying or apologizing for European imperialism. But China was/is an empire, too. It's not *just* a white person thing to dominate other cultures/peoples and destroy/take their nice things. I'm also not saying that a country that does bad things shouldn't complain about having bad things done to it. But more nuance addressing China's difficult histories would have been nice.)

I think with a little more nuance around these issues, this could have been a fun read, and the necessary suspension of disbelief would have been more willing. I am kind of sad, because I am looking for a fun novel of ideas about museums that I can assign to my students, and I thought this would fit the bill. But I think I would spend too much time correcting the misperceptions for it to be useful. show less

The backdrop is an international, college-aged, Oceans 11 with Chinese art but this novel is ultimately about the burden of expectations that the children of immigrants carry in America and how they find their own way. The art theft plotting is intricate, clever, and satisfying. But while each of the five main characters has a different backstory, they are all essentially dealing with the same personal crisis - what happens after college? Can they live out the expectations of their families show more and feel fulfilled? Their thoughts and feelings are so similar that their introspection becomes repetitive. Art is an important element of the narrative but the author includes so many descriptive passages involving light that it starts to feel like a drinking game. The overall tone of the dialogue is ethereal which seems out of place for a story that is, at least in part, a heist thriller involving college kids. show less

This is a pleasant character study with wonderful sentences. The first heist occurs more than a hundred pages into the novel, and the others are quick to follow. If this were an action book, pacing would be a huge problem. The characters all began to sound the same at certain points, despite each coming from starkly different backgrounds from each other. I kept thinking, "When this gets turned into a movie, it's gonna be awesome." I didn't buy the romance between--either of the characters show more that got paired off, really. The Queer romance felt rushed, tokenized, and like a cross between "see, haha, I checked something off of the diversity checklist!" and "this is actually legit, I just didn't know how to develop it within the context of an action heist book." It's too bad. I was looking forward to cheering for them. Everyone was linked with one another, some tightly. How fascinating! I thought some of the links were explored well. Some, I had to fill in the blanks. I believed most of it, though. I was caught between wanting the book to be at least fifty pages shorter and still nonetheless enjoying the -sentences- of this book. I'm eager to browse other works of the author's. show less