Echoes from the Nanyang - Roots Across the Sea
by:
lim ju boo - Chinese name: lin ru wu (林 如 武) - whose parents too were from China. I am one of the diaspora who landed in Malaya then
There is currently a very popular movie called being screened in China, Malaysia and Singapore called “Dear You (给阿嫲的情书)”
It is a massive sleeper hit in China about qiaopi—the historical remittance letters and lifelines sent between Chinese emigrants in Southeast Asia and their families back home. It follows a debt-ridden grandson who travels to Thailand searching for his estranged billionaire grandfather, only to uncover a heartbreaking decades-old secret about love, duty, and sacrifice.
The film is not only a box-office phenomenon but has also captured the hearts of audiences across China and Southeast Asia for its unique cultural focus:
The Core Story
The story is about Xiaowei’s search. He travels to Bangkok to track down his grandfather, Zheng Musheng. Decades prior, during the Chinese Civil War in the 1940s, his grandfather left coastal China for Southeast Asia to avoid being conscripted.
Upon arriving in Thailand, Xiaowei discovers his grandfather died long ago. He unravels a startling truth: the man who had been exchanging love letters and money with his grandmother (Ye Shurou) back in China for over 50 years was actually a complete stranger who took on the responsibility of writing them.
The movie highlights qingyi (deep supportive bonds) as it explores how his grandmother and a fellow village woman in Thailand navigated a half-century of hidden feelings and devotion, maintaining the ritual of keeping someone alive across oceans through paper and ink.
The movie is very popular in China about regional roots. It is shot almost entirely in the Teochew dialect (Chaoshan dialect) instead of standard Mandarin. This has deeply moved audiences, sparking a cultural resurgence and reconnecting Chinese youth with their ancestral heritage and diaspora roots.
By focusing on the historical qiaopi tradition, it strikes an emotional chord with generations of families whose ancestors migrated to countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. It acts as a beautiful meditation on duty, patience, and how families stayed emotionally connected despite years of separation.
Though made on a modest budget, its unexpected viral success has led to global screenings, spreading the story of overseas Chinese immigrant communities to a worldwide audience.
Meantime, I have also received a commentary on “Dear You” - written by SC Shekar. It was forwarded to me by Mr. Mano through WhatApp
Here’s what Shekar wrote:
Dear You and the Lives We Inherited.
Last night, my wife and I went to our neighbourhood cinema to watch the Teochew film 'Dear You'.
I must confess that I have probably watched only two Chinese-language films in a cinema in my entire life. So when I walked into the TGV hall and saw just 12 people seated in a cinema built for about 100, with me quite possibly the only Indian in the room, I assumed the film was headed for failure.
I was wrong.
By the time the film ended, my wife and I were wiping away our tears and the elderly gentleman seated beside me was sobbing into his handkerchief.
Dear You begins in present-day Shantou, where Shurou, an 87-year-old matriarch, is celebrating her birthday. Around her are family members, neighbours and friends who revere her not merely because she has lived a long life, but because she survived one. In the 1940s and 1950s, she raised three children on her own after her husband, Zheng Musheng, left for Bangkok (in an attempt to dodge the Chinese military draft) and never returned.
Decades later, her grandson Xiaowei, in debt and looking for a way out, travels to Thailand in search of this absent grandfather, who is rumoured to have made his fortune there, endowed schools, and started another family.
On paper, it may sound like another story of abandonment, migration and family secrets. But Dear You is far more than that. Its power lies in its specificity. The film is spoken entirely in Teochew, a language rooted in a particular place, memory and people. The cast is made up largely of non-professional actors, many drawn from the local community. There are no stars or celebrities. What it offers instead is something far rarer: the emotional truth of ordinary lives.
Made on a shoestring budget of about 10 million yuan, or roughly US$1.5 million, the film went on to become a major hit in China, earning more than 600 million yuan. On Douban, it scored 9.1, putting it in the company of films such as Titanic, Spirited Away and The Shawshank Redemption. That alone says something. Audiences recognized themselves in it.
But what moved me most was not the box-office success or the statistics. It was the way the film opened a door into my own family history, and also into my wife’s.
There is a scene towards the end where people line up before a letter writer, each telling him what to say to a loved one far away. That scene broke me.
It reminded me of a world in which reading and writing were not taken for granted. A world where literacy was power. Where the person who could write a letter became the bridge between a mother and a son, between a husband and a wife, between a family left behind and a life being built elsewhere.
Before telephones became common, before email, before WhatsApp and video calls made distance feel almost meaningless, there was the letter. And for those who could not write, there was the letter writer. He was not merely a man with pen and paper. He was witness, translator, messenger and confidant. He carried grief, longing, apology, duty, love and news across oceans.
That part of the film struck me deeply.
It brought back the memory of my father writing letters to his father in India. I remember the postal money orders he sent, and the small household items and medicines he would occasionally arrange to send back to the village, things that were unavailable there or difficult to obtain. These were not grand gestures, they were acts of duty. They were the obligations of an immigrant son who had crossed the sea but had not severed the cord.
My father came from India into a world that demanded discipline, restraint and sacrifice. He understood the value of education not as an abstract ideal, but as a way out. For immigrant families of that generation, education was a ticket out of poverty. It was survival. It was the difference between dependence and dignity. It was the one inheritance poor parents could leave their children when there was no land, no wealth and no certainty.
Like so many men and women of his generation, he carried his family in remittances, letters, silence and work. The distance between Malaya and India was measured not only in nautical miles but in longing, responsibility and the ache of absence.
The film also reminded me of my mother’s stories of growing up in Singapore in the 1930s. She used to speak of an “imported young Chinese girl” the family had purchased, who lived with her as a companion and maid. This girl, still so young herself, had been brought across from China, as so many were in those years, into homes and lives far from where she was born.
Then came the war. The world closed in. Borders closed. Ships stopped. Families disappeared into history. That young girl could never return to China.
I do not know what became of her. Perhaps my mother never knew either. But watching Dear You, I thought of her again. One small life carried across the sea, then trapped by history.
Sitting beside me was my wife, Lynette, whose own Hokkien ancestry carries another version of the same story. Her grandparents struggled in Kuantan to raise ten children. Then my father-in-law who had to raise and educate his 9 siblings when his father passed away. Ten children. It is easy to say that now, as a number, but it must have meant years of work, rationing, worry, school fees, illnesses, food on the table, clothes passed from one child to another, and the constant arithmetic of survival.
There was no romance in that struggle. There was only the daily demand to keep a family together.
And central to that struggle was education. Immigrant parents of that generation may not have had much themselves, but they knew what school meant. They knew that a child who could read, write, count and speak with confidence might one day stand a little taller in the world. They saved for schoolbooks. They worried over fees. They insisted on discipline because they had seen what life was like without choices.
This is the history we often forget when we speak too casually of success. Behind every educated child, every shopfront, every family business, every modest house, every university graduate, there was often a grandmother who stretched a meal, a grandfather who worked until his body gave way, a mother who went without food, and a father who carried more than he ever said.
How many such lives must there have been across Asia? Chinese, Indian, Tamil, Teochew, Hokkien, Cantonese, Sikh, Ceylonese. Men and women moved by hunger, debt, hope, colonial labour systems, family obligation and the stubborn belief that tomorrow might be kinder than yesterday.
This is why Dear You matters.
It is not only a Chinese story. It is an Asian story. It is also a Malaysian story.
The immigrant communities of this region were built on hard work, discipline and austerity. They arrived poor, often alone, often unable to return, and they built lives in places that did not yet fully belong to them. They raised children, buried parents from afar, sent money home, learned new languages, endured humiliation, and slowly became part of the soil.
They also placed their faith in education, sometimes with a severity that later generations misunderstood. Books were not decorative objects. Examinations were not merely academic events. A report card could decide the mood of a household. A scholarship could change the fate of an entire family. A letter from a child abroad could be read and reread until the paper softened in the hand.
I have seen similar traces in Kaki Bukit, the small mining town in Perlis where a Hakka community once built its life around tin and limestone. There, too, letters connected families separated by distance, work and obligation. Kaki Bukit has the makings of a similar film: migration, mining, hardship, education, and a community trying to build a better life from very little. Perhaps a Malaysian filmmaker will tell this story sometime soon.
Today, many of their descendants live with comfort their grandparents could not have imagined. But somewhere beneath that comfort are scars. Some are visible. Many are not. They remain in the way families speak of sacrifice. In the fear of waste. In the reverence for education. In the obsession with work. In the old letters kept in drawers. In money sent home. In names slowly lost. In languages that survive only at the dinner table, then slowly disappear.
Dear You understands this.
It understands that communication is not merely the exchange of information. It is how families remain families across distance. It is how the absent remain present. It is how the dead continue to speak. It is how the abandoned are remembered, the forgiven are named, and the forgotten are brought back into the room.
Cinematographer Hai Tao’s images are warm without being sentimental. The mid-century production design by Wang Zichao and Zhao Junxiang has a lived-in quality that gives the film its texture. The performances, especially by Li Sitong and Wang Xiaohui, do not feel acted.
My only real complaint, watching it in Malaysia, was the placement of the English subtitles at the bottom of the screen. It made it difficult at times to read and watch the film properly. For a film so dependent on faces, pauses and gestures, that is no small thing.
Still, Malaysians should watch Dear You.
Not because it is a “Chinese movie”. Not because it has become a hit in China. But because it reminds us of something we too often forget: that every settled life we take for granted today was built by people who once lived unsettled lives.
Immigrants, then and now, do not leave home easily. They leave because something has broken, or because something must be built. They leave because a family is waiting on the other side of hunger. They leave because the future has become impossible where they are.
And if they are lucky, decades later, someone makes a film about them. Not about heroes or tycoons or national figures, but about the people who wrote letters, waited by doors, raised children alone, sent money home, taught their children to read, and carried entire histories without complaint.
That is what Dear You did for me last night.
It reminded me of my parents.
It reminded me of my wife’s grandparents in Kuantan, and of the ten children they raised through difficulty and resolve.
It reminded me that education was never simply about getting ahead. For families like ours, it was about staying alive, staying connected and refusing to let poverty have the final word.
And in the darkness of a half-empty cinema, it reminded me that some stories do not need a full hall to be understood. They need only one person willing to remember.
SC Shekar
6th July 2026
Photos downloaded from the web
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