It is a quiet evening in a Malaysian cinema, yet the silence is heavy. When the credits roll on Lan Hongchun's 2026 Teochew-dialect film Dear You (给阿嬷的情书), many in the audience do not move.
They sit in the dim light, eyes fixed on a distance only they can see. Among the older generation, the emotional reaction is visceral as they confront a cinematic mirror of their own family histories.
Produced on a modest budget of 14 mil yuan (RM9mil), Dear You became an extraordinary sleeper hit in China, grossing more than 1.8bil yuan (RM1.085bil).
When it opened in South-East Asia, it did more than accumulate box office revenue.
In Malaysia, where it earned over RM8.2mil, audiences flocked to meet the director and cast, eager to connect with a story that felt intimately theirs.The film's soundtrack features Harapanku, performed by Teresa Teng – an adaptation of the classic Nanyang Girl, written by a Malaysian and inspired by a girl from Penang – creating an artistic thread between China and the Straits.
Initially, under the nation's long-standing bilingual policy, only a Mandarin-dubbed version was approved for general commercial release, while the original Teochew version was confined to special screenings.
Public disappointment quickly mounted, prompting parliamentary questions over whether the continued marginalisation of regional Chinese dialects remained justified.
In response to overwhelming demand, authorities eventually approved an additional 50 screenings in the original dialect, transforming what began as a commercial release into a significant cultural event.
To understand why a simple family drama has struck such a sensitive nerve, one must look beyond nostalgia and examine the history of the Teochew diaspora.
The migration from the Chaoshan region of Guangdong to British Malaya and Singapore was rarely a journey of ambition. It was a journey of survival.
Driven by poverty, upheaval and conflict, thousands crossed the sea with little more than hope.
Many arrived as sinkeh, or new arrivals, bound by exploitative labour arrangements. Whether working as stevedores unloading cargo, clearing malaria-infested land or pedalling trishaws for long hours, they endured punishing physical labour for meagre wages. Isolated from their families and without any safety net, many turned to opium or gambling to dull physical pain and emotional despair.
A significant number died in poverty, never achieving the prosperity they had crossed the ocean to find.
This collective history is grounded in personal stories like my own family's.
My grandfather left Chaoshan before the Second World War and arrived in Penang with nothing. He began as a manual labourer before becoming a trishaw rider.
His life was defined by relentless frugality. He survived on the barest meals, often subsisting on rice gruel between fares, saving every cent he could.
Decades of sacrifice eventually allowed him to establish a small business and acquire properties in both Penang and Swatow.
Yet his motivation was never personal comfort. It was to fulfil an obligation to the family he had left behind through the fragile but vital system of the qiaopi.
The qiaopi was both remittance and letter, a bank transfer and a love letter combined. Long before modern banking, it became the economic and emotional artery of the Chinese diaspora.
Carried by trusted couriers and later by specialised remittance firms, these envelopes delivered not only money but reassurance, duty and hope across the ocean.
For countless families in coastal China, they paid school fees, repaired homes and sustained daily life while carrying words that kept families emotionally connected despite years of separation.
Many labourers were illiterate and relied on professional letter writers who sat beneath the five-foot ways of Penang, Singapore and later Kuala Lumpur.
For a few cents, they transformed spoken dialect into elegant Chinese calligraphy, preserving family ties over thousands of miles.
As a baby boomer, I still remember these letter writers in KL well into the 1980s. Labourers would squat beside them, trying to compress months of longing into a few precious sentences home.
Many were deeply tanned, their wiry bodies and weathered faces revealing lives of hardship. The profession disappeared only as literacy improved and telephone lines became commonplace.
As migrants gradually found their footing, survival gave way to community building through the Teochew ideal of gaginang (our own people).
What began as a practical instinct for mutual support evolved into a network of clan associations, temples and charitable organisations that provided lodging, welfare, education and belonging for generations of immigrants navigating an unfamiliar world. These institutions became the foundations upon which many Teochew communities in Malaysia and Singapore were built.
They also championed Chinese education because they understood that language was the vessel of cultural continuity.
Schools such as Han Chiang in Penang and those supported by the Ngee Ann Kongsi in Singapore reflected the pioneers' determination to preserve their heritage.
Ironically, that success produced a new dilemma. In the decades after independence, both Malaysia and Singapore promoted standard Mandarin and English to strengthen national cohesion. Dialects gradually disappeared from schools, broadcasting and daily life.
Today, Teochew is rapidly fading among younger generations.
The consequences are deeply personal. Grandparents fluent only in dialect increasingly struggle to communicate with grandchildren who speak only Mandarin or English. Along with the language disappears a lifetime of stories, memories and family history that cannot easily be translated.
Today, China exports cultural works like Dear You back to South-East Asia to remind the diaspora of its own heritage.
The film has inevitably attracted political interpretations, with some commentators viewing it through the lens of contemporary Chinese soft power. Others reject that reading entirely, insisting that its emotional force lies in its universal themes of love, duty and sacrifice. Whatever one's perspective, the larger question remains the same: what does it mean when a community depends on another country to preserve its own collective memory?
The overwhelming response to Dear You suggests that preserving Teochew heritage cannot rest solely with museums, clan associations or historical archives. A language survives only when it is spoken.
If the Teochew dialect disappears from homes in Malaysia and Singapore, an irreplaceable part of the community's identity disappears with it. A language preserved only in archives becomes a museum exhibit rather than a living culture.
The emotional response to Dear You should therefore be more than nostalgia. It should be a call to bring the ancestral tongue back into daily life, ensuring that the voices of our grandparents do not fade into silence.
