Dialect an enduring bond to home across generations and seas

A film that many of its overseas viewers may not fully understand has opened across Southeast Asia, and is being embraced there as if it were their own. Dear You, a drama spoken almost entirely in the Chaoshan (Teochew) dialect of South China's Guangdong province, became an unlikely hit in the Chinese mainland this spring and has since traveled to the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions, Singapore, Malaysia and beyond. Most commentary has focused on why a small dialect film with no big stars succeeded. But the more pertinent question is why it has resonated so deeply with overseas Chinese, and what that reveals about the relationship between language, memory and identity.

The answer lies in something older than the film itself: the bond between a native tongue and the people who once carried it across the seas. Dear You is the latest chapter in a long story linking Chinese-dialect cinema and the Nanyang Chinese, the ethnic Chinese communities of maritime Southeast Asia.

That relationship dates back to the war years. In the late 1930s, as China fought for survival, films and newsreels on anti-Japanese invasion from the mainland filled cinemas in British Malaya — among them Hokkien-dialect films such as a 1938 newsreel on the defense of Xiamen, Fujian province — rallying immigrant audiences in the language of their native villages. In the 1950s and 1960s, films in the Hokkien and Teochew dialects, which were financed by Nanyang capital and produced in Hong Kong, gave sojourners who still dreamed of returning home something precious: a homeland they could hear. The native tongue was the link: first as a tool of wartime mobilization, and then a comfort against homesickness.

Dear You marks a third moment in this history, and a reversal. Earlier, films traveled outward from China to the diaspora. This time, a mainland film made in a Chinese dialect has journeyed to the communities whose forebears planted roots there long ago. The direction has reversed. It is no longer the diaspora looking toward home; it is a work from home that traveled out to be recognized and embraced. For decades, the homeland called and the diaspora listened. Now it is the homeland's film that waits to be claimed.

The reversal also says something about dialect itself. Film distributors often regarded dialect as a barrier to a film's reach. In reality, it is a medium of identity and memory. In Singapore and Malaysia, audiences with roots in China's Fujian and Guangdong provinces have wept and lined up to see Dear You, not because they follow every word, but because the sound — and its story of letters sent home — speaks to who they are.

At a special screening in Kuala Lumpur, Chiew Choon Man, Malaysia's deputy minister of tourism, arts and culture, speaking on behalf of Minister Tiong King Sing, said the film highlights a shared chapter of history familiar to many Malaysian Chinese families. Even the debate over whether the film should be screened in its original Teochew or in a Mandarin-dubbed version underscores this point. For these communities, the native tongue is not mere packaging; it carries identity.

The emotional engine of Dear You is the qiaopi — the remittance letters that overseas Chinese once sent home with a few lines of news folded around a little money. Inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2013, these letters transform a private family story into a shared history of migration, sacrifice and fidelity. That heritage belongs to both China and to the Chinese communities of Southeast Asia, making it a natural bridge between them.

The film's arc mirrors the diaspora's own journey. In a now-familiar formulation among scholars of the overseas Chinese, the diaspora has, over the generations, evolved from "fallen leaves returning to their roots" to "putting down roots where one lands".

Dear You points to yet another stage: reconnection after taking root. Communities that are now firmly and confidently local still choose to reclaim their cultural ties to the ancestral land, not by going back, but by listening once again to a familiar sound and reading an old letter once more. This reconnection, tellingly, is led less by the old than by the young, whose growing interest in regional and local culture Dear You has tapped.

Ultimately, Dear You shows that the bond between a diaspora and its ancestral culture does not simply fade as communities settle and assimilate. It renews itself, often when least expected, and increasingly through the young.

The native tongue is the thread that binds. A century ago, it called immigrants to support a homeland in crisis. Today, it draws their grandchildren toward a shared memory. Once, that pull was a summons answered out of duty; now it is a connection reclaimed by choice.

The film's own journey has a striking symmetry. The qiaopi once traveled outward, carrying a family's hopes and survival across the South China Sea. Now a film built on those letters crosses the same waters in the same direction, yet the people who receive it are no longer distant sons and daughters waiting to be called home. They are confident citizens of their own countries who, hearing a familiar dialect and reading an old letter, choose to recognize themselves in it. The native tongue, it turns out, was never the limit of the story. It was the reason the story could be answered, across the seas and across generations.

The author is a lecturer and master's supervisor at the School of Cultural Industries and Tourism, Xiamen University of Technology, and a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore.

The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily. 

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