“Souchou Yao is a generous scholar, grounding his rigorous examination of cultural desire and denial in vulnerable reflections on the intimate turmoils of his own diasporic experience. Here, Yao draws out the anxieties and attractions that have been attached to the Chinese classical tradition in the modern Sinophone world—from the literary iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement in early twentieth- century China, to his own attempts at forging a sense of cultural belonging by studying the classical canon in 1960s Malaysia. In this work he nonetheless reminds us to reclaim the imaginative pleasure of reading for ourselves.”

—Minerva Inwald, Assistant Lecturer in Chinese History, The University of Melbourne

“In his luminous essay, Yao explores cultural identification, pleasure, resistance, and agency through an embodied reading of Xu Bing’s monumental Tian Shu (天書, Book from the Sky). Xu’s invented 4,000 unreadable characters—exquisite, calligraphic, and uncanny—set the stage for Yao to move fluidly across the vast but entangled terrains of cultural theory, childhood language drills, and the uneasy seductions of Xu’s unreadable but aesthetically alluring texts. Yao writes viscerally about how language can enchant and broaden our worldviews even as it binds us to legacies of violence. Generous and incisive, Books from Heaven revives the enduring power of language and their texts: not merely to hold meaning, but to transform our encounters with history, politics, culture, and above all, to lead us back to ourselves.”

—Lilian Chee, author of Architecture and Affect: Precarious Spaces