A low-budget Chinese family drama and migration story, performed in a language most viewers in China can barely understand, has become the country’s surprise box office hit of the year. It also has won the praise of and found use by Chinese officials, who see it as a vessel for a key message to the Chinese diaspora.
“Dear You,” more literally “A Love Letter to Grandma,” is almost entirely in Teochew, a language from the coastal Chaoshan region of southeastern China, known for a long history of migration to Southeast Asia, including by people seeking to earn money for families they left behind. The film follows a debt-ridden grandson who travels to Thailand to find the grandfather his grandmother waited for all her life.
Beyond China, the film has found an audience among the ethnic Chinese diaspora of more than 40 million people in Southeast Asia — drawing the notice of China’s government and its critics, as Beijing looks to cultivate loyalty among Chinese communities abroad.
Made by director Lan Hongchun for a reported budget of less than $2 million, featuring a largely nonprofessional cast that includes Thai and Thai Chinese actors, the film has grossed some $283 million so far, according to Maoyan, a Chinese box-office-tracking platform. On Douban, a Chinese film review site similar to Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 9.3 rating from more than 880,000 users, unusually high for a domestic commercial release.
The success stands out in a Chinese film market shaped by increasing censorship and the state’s “dragon seal” approval system, which films including independent productions such as “Dear You” must navigate. Chinese law requires movies to promote “socialist core values,” and many of the biggest domestic hits in recent years have been patriotic, overtly propagandistic spectacles such as Korean War epics and anti-Japanese war films.
“Dear You” is different. Chinese reviewers describe the film as “sincere,” praising its emotional restraint and quiet focus on ordinary lives and border-spanning solidarity between a Thai woman of Chinese descent and a Chinese family, as the protagonist uncovers a secret history of loss and selflessness.
Andrea Liu, 23, a medical student in Beijing, went to see the film alone after reading glowing reviews across Chinese social media. She said it stood out because many viewers had grown tired of state-aligned “main melody” films that feel heavy-handed and didactic.
“It trusts the actors to express subtle emotions, and it trusts the audience to understand what is left unsaid,” she said.
The story of leaving home to support loved ones is broadly resonant in China, where rural-to-urban migration echoes themes of emigration, said Judy Zhang, 26, a marketing specialist navigating Shanghai’s competitive professional world, in which stable work can feel increasingly out of reach for many young people.
“Not every part of that history maps exactly onto what happened in your own family,” Zhang said. “But there are still common points.”
In a widely liked review on Douban, one viewer describes the film as “a pure beam of light” shining into “an age marked by division and fading human bonds.”
Chinese state agencies, which do not appear to have funded the film, have embraced it, organizing screenings and celebrating it as a reminder of the cultural and emotional ties linking the Chinese diaspora to China. They have framed it within the government’s broader “United Front” effort, which seek to expand Beijing’s influence among and by way of Chinese diaspora communities.
In an interview with Chinese state-controlled news service Xinhua, Cui Chaoyang, a senior Guangdong propaganda official and chief of the province’s film bureau, said “Dear You” was “not only a movie” but a “cultural bond” that could “gather overseas Chinese hearts and strength.”
The film, Cui said, awakens “the shared roots and dreams” of Chinese people at home and abroad, and encourages young people and Chinese people in the diaspora to contribute to the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
The film’s production company did not respond to requests to speak with Lan, the director, or for comment about the movie’s reception among audiences in China and overseas.
In an essay for People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, Lan wrote that the film was a “love letter” to overseas Chinese and the ancestral home, and a tribute to the “spiritual bloodline” of Chinese people.
The film’s overseas rollout began last week in markets including Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei, along with Hong Kong and Macao.
Some communities, however, have bristled at this message, particularly in Singapore.
In Singapore’s main Chinese-language newspaper, Lianhe Zaobao, columnist Shen Zewei in May called “Dear You” “a very successful United Front film.” Unlike cruder propaganda, she argued, the film works by reaching “the softest part of the heart,” using emotion to make viewers feel closer to China and to create a cross-border sense of Chinese belonging.
Still, Shen wrote, the film did not budge her conviction that “my connection to China is one of ancestral heritage instead of patriotic allegiance.”
Ethnic Chinese make up about 74 percent of Singapore’s population, alongside Malay, Indian and other communities. For Chinese Singaporeans, many of whose families left China generations ago, a level of cultural affinity with China does not translate into political loyalty, said Chong Ja Ian, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore.
During an official visit to Shanghai last month, Singapore’s senior minister, Lee Hsien Loong, made a pointed statement on identity.
“We are a Chinese-majority country, but we are a multiracial society,” Lee said. “We are a separate country with separate sovereignty from China. We cooperate as friends and in order to have mutual benefit.”
Soon after Shen’s column ran, comments surged across social media sites condemning her views and the Singaporean government, according to a senior editor at Singapore Press Holdings.
In an editorial, without directly naming Lianhe Zaobao, the Chinese nationalist tabloid Global Times accused the Singaporean newspaper of publishing “sarcastic” articles that labeled the film a “United Front tool” and portrayed it as “psychological warfare” aimed at weakening Singaporean Chinese identity.
Such criticism, the editorial said, was “not only disrespectful to the creative work, but also a hasty reading of history.”
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