The three-day conflagration sparked China’s 21st century challenges of the provenance of artifacts displayed in Western museums, a bid by wealthy Chinese and government-backed corporations to snap up pilfered items at auction, and speculation that treasures lifted from European museums over the last decade had been “stolen to order” by those intent on repatriating the art to China. Thieves targeted priceless Chinese antiquities that had been pilfered in 1860 by French and English invaders who ransacked and looted the Old Summer Palace, a constellation of 200 ornate palaces, pavilions, courtyards and gardens, before burning the complex to the ground. Li, whose parents emigrated from China in the 1990s, says the story “struck me deeply.” Digging deeper, she learned that such robberies, from museums in Sweden, Norway, England and France, had started almost a decade before. When she was in the middle of applying for medical school, she read a newspaper story about the heist of Chinese jade and gold artifacts from a museum in southwestern England.
She taught biology in the Bronx and ran a high school’s first creative writing program. The CEO offers $50 million to Chen and his hand-selected group of students to steal five bronze Zodiac heads that once adorned a fountain in Beijing’s Old Summer Palace.Īs improbable as that setup may sound, Li says inspiration for her heist novel came from a true story.Īfter graduating from Duke University with a major in biology and a minor in creative writing, Li had taken a two-year assignment with Teach for America in New York. That experience and a racist encounter with cops investigating the crime propel Chen to reach out to the chief executive of a shadowy Chinese government-backed conglomerate. The novel’s main character, Will Chen, is a Harvard art history student who witnesses the theft of Chinese artifacts from a campus museum by an organized team that leaves him an intriguing calling card. The premise of “Portrait of a Thief” is deceptively simple. “Despite the differences between medicine and writing,” she says during a recent conversation, “both require thinking deeply and thoughtfully about the world and the people in it.”
The story of why Li turned to fiction in a crisis - and pursued two seemingly opposing career paths - has as many twists and turns as Li’s novel, born from her experiences as a scientist and writer, American-born and ethnically Chinese.įor Li, who starts her third year in medical school this summer, her career choices aren’t contradictory.
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