It was never supposed to go this far. A Chaoshan-dialect film with no stars, no slick marketing, and a budget of just 14 million yuan debuted on April 30 with a mere 3.6% share of screenings. The film grossed 3.77 million yuan on its first-day box office.
But then people started talking. Three weeks later, Dear You has crossed 1 billion yuan ($146 million), held the top daily spot for fifteen consecutive days, and reached a rare 9.1 rating on Douban. This was a quiet, unexpected storm.
The plot is simple. In the 1940s, a young man named Zheng Musheng leaves his Chaoshan hometown to work in Southeast Asia to avoid conscription. He sends letters and remittances home. Then he dies. A woman in his migrant community, Xie Nanzhi, grieving a man she barely knew, continues writing in his name for eighteen years—sending money and weaving gentle lies to keep hope alive for the wife and children across the sea. It is a story of duty and compassion.
But the true protagonist is the qiaopi, which is a remittance letter sent home by Chinese emigrants, and often contains money folded inside. For about 150 years, these letters crossed the South China Sea, connecting laborers in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia to villages in Guangdong and Fujian. In 2013, qiaopi archives were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. Singapore was the heart of this network.
Johnny Tan, a Singaporean Chinese of Hokkien descent, remembers: "My grandfather came south as a 'piglet'—sold away because there was no way to survive. He worked as a coolie at the barge piers." Tan recalls how his grandfather's generation would place "orders" for bicycles or refrigerators to send home, when China was still in an era of material scarcity. During WWII, many donated money or even returned to fight. "Their homesickness ran so deep," Tan says. "Everything was tied to their hometown."
Dear You has reached audiences across Southeast Asia and Chinese communities worldwide. The film's director, Lan Hongchun, a Chaoshan native, says 90% of the plot is based on real-life prototypes. "We hope audiences will recognize a form of solidarity that extends beyond blood ties and national boundaries."
From the 1860s to 1911, nearly 2.94 million Chaoshan residents crossed the seas to work in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar. In those years, four or five out of every ten Chaoshan residents relied on qiaopi to survive. Those letters, often dictated to public scribes, followed a blunt script: I am well. Enclosed is a small amount. Take care of mother.
Johnny Tan ends his story quietly: "We remember this history, and we cherish it. We are very content with everything we have now." That contentment, earned through generations of hardship and displacement, is the real inheritance of the diaspora. Dear You reminds millions that the letters their grandparents wrote, and the ones they never got to write, still matter. And that is a story no one can stop.
Cameraman: Guo Zedong
Reporter: Guo Zedong
Video & Cover: Zeng Xiangxing
