‘Dear You’ and the Teochew diaspora paradox — Chew Kok Liang

JUNE 29 — When the credits roll on Lan Hongchun’s Teochew-dialect film Dear You (给阿嬷的情书) in a dim Malaysian cinema, a heavy silence falls. Many in the audience sit motionless, tears pooling quietly. For the older generation, this simple family drama is a visceral mirror of their own ancestral struggles. 

Produced on a modest budget, the film grossed over 1.8 billion yuan in China before crossing the ocean to Nanyang (South-east Asia). 

In Malaysia, it smashed box office records by surging past RM8.2 million, drawing massive crowds eager to connect with a story that feels intimately theirs. Yet, beneath the cinematic success lies a deeper, urgent cultural reckoning regarding the rapid erasure of our heritage tongues. 

Brutal reality of Nanyang 

To understand why Dear You strikes such a sensitive nerve, one must look past nostalgia to the unvarnished history of the Teochew diaspora. The historic migration from the Chaoshan region to British Malaya was driven by desperate survival, rampant poverty, and civil conflict. 

Thousands of young men boarded junk ships with absolutely nothing. Upon arrival, they were classified as sinkeh (new arrivals) and bound by exploitative indentured labour contracts. In Malaya, they were packed into Kongsi houses and sprawling clan settlements in early colonial trade hubs like Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Ipoh. 

These men pushed their bodies to physical breaking points as manual coolies and stevedores for mere cents. Lacking any state safety net, many turned to opium and gambling to cope with psychological despair. A significant number died in poverty, buried in unmarked communal graves. 

A shared anchor 

This collective trauma is grounded in specific ancestral journeys that mirror the characters in the film. Like many Teochew families, my grandfather left Chaoshan before World War II. Arriving in Penang, he began life at the lowest tier of the colonial economy, working as a manual coolie and later as a trishaw man. 

His daily survival depended on extreme frugality. He lived on minimal sustenance, routinely skipping meals to hoard every cent. Over decades of unrelenting labour, he eventually established a small business and acquired properties. Yet, his motivation was never personal luxury; it was the fulfilment of a long-distance obligation to feed the family he left behind. 

In those days, illiterate labourers relied on five-foot-way letter writers in Kuala Lumpur and Penang to send love letters and financial remittances home. Squeezing their lives into a few formal words, these migrants-maintained family ties across thousands of miles. 

Paradox of progress 

As individual migrants found their footing, they pooled resources via clan associations like the Penang Teochew Association to fund vernacular education, building Han Chiang Primary School in 1919 and Han Chiang High School in 1950. For these pioneers, supporting Chinese-medium education was a sacred effort to preserve their identity. 

However, this success produced a profound structural paradox. In the post-independence era, vernacular schools implemented strict rules enforcing standardized Mandarin, often fining or punishing students for speaking dialects on school grounds. 

While pioneers successfully secured formal Chinese education, local heritage dialects were marginalised. Today, the Teochew dialect is rapidly fading and is nearly obsolete among Malaysian youth. This linguistic decline has created a painful generational gap. Grandparents fluent only in dialect struggle to communicate with grandchildren who speak only English or Mandarin, fracturing the transmission of oral family history. 

Outsourcing our memory 

This shift points to a striking historical irony. For over a century, the economic flow was unidirectional: the diaspora in Southeast Asia sent financial lifelines back to China. Today, the dynamic has completely reversed. China is now exporting massive cultural capital, like Dear You, back to South-east Asia to remind us of our own heritage. 

When a community must rely on media from another nation to appreciate its own history, it has effectively outsourced the preservation of its collective memory. 

The emotional response to Dear You must serve as an urgent call to action. While historical institutions and museums manage properties, they cannot save a dying language on their own. A language preserved only in archives is a museum piece, not a living culture. It challenges the younger generation to bring their ancestral tongue back into their homes, ensuring the voices of our grandparents do not fade into ultimate silence.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.