I first heard about the movie “Dear You” from an online article accusing it of being Chinese Communist Party propaganda, engineered to forge an emotional bond with the Chinese diaspora, particularly those of us in Southeast Asia. Now, I consider myself pretty savvy at sniffing out subconscious attempts to buy my loyalty. So naturally, I bought a ticket.
All my direct relatives, save for my paternal grandfather, were born here. But I grew up on tales from uncles and aunties about distant relatives who crossed the South China Sea to British Malaya. The reason for such a drastic uprooting from “Tang Mountains” (Thengsua or Tongsan for Malaysian readers) was that the homeland then was busy with civil war, poverty and a generally short list of valid reasons to stay.
In these retellings, the distant relatives were either fleeing war or chasing fortune, depending on who was holding the floor (and whether the alcohol at these gatherings was free-flowing). But the moral of the story never changed: regardless of the circumstances you find yourself in, you too can become comfortably middle class through hard work and grit.
Watching “Dear You” felt oddly familiar. It is a Chinese film spoken in Teochew, set in mid-20th century Bangkok. I don’t speak Teochew, but my Penang Hokkien got me through maybe a fifth of the dialogue, which proved useful whenever my eyes were too tired to read the subtitles. The rest might as well have been in French to a “banana” descendant like me, but the characters’ demeanour, their way of thinking, the way they justified their choices to themselves needed no translation.
The film centres on Tay Bak Seng (the Malaysian and Singaporean anglicised spelling), a young man who leaves his wife and children to dodge the draft during the Civil War. He lands first in Malaya, then Thailand, breaking his back at labouring jobs to send money home. His story unfolds through the letters, qiaopi, he mails back to his young family. Then the letters stop, the last one arriving with a photograph of him with another young woman. And children.
I won’t spoil the plot beyond that. But I will say this about the film itself. I walked in braced for melodrama, the kind of precision-engineered tear-duct stimulation that K-dramas have perfected. Instead, the movie turned out to be emotionally honest. There were moments that really got me but they were earned. Nobody swelled the violins over a dreamy montage of the story’s most heart-wrenching beats. The filmmakers were fair to the audience, laying out the situations these people were in and the consequences of their choices without flinching. A well-told human story about struggle, perseverance and redemption.
So, circling back: is this China’s grand scheme to win over the non-China Chinese? I doubt it. The story will resonate with plenty of Malaysian Chinese, sure. But being moved by a Teochew grandfather’s heartbreak is a long way from swearing fealty to Beijing. I teared up more times than I care to admit and my loyalty remains firmly with the land where my darah tumpah.
Because the “Tang Mountains” of the film isn’t really a country. It is a romanticised time and place that no longer exists, an ideal forged by people who stared up at the stars after years of hard labour and soothed themselves with the hope of returning once they’d made their fortune in these strange new lands. Most never did. They perished in places they refused to call home, even though home, by then, was wherever they had been accepted to pour their blood, sweat and tears in.
Maybe that’s why the film hit me the way it did. It felt like an official acknowledgement that all those family legends were real. That somewhere in the historical record, there actually was a granduncle who arrived with nothing but two shirts and a debt. The uncles and aunties weren’t making it (all) up. Embellishing, yes. But the moral held then and it holds now. Work hard, respect your elders, and one day you too will own a two-and-a-half storey linked house in a cosy suburb, with one nice car to show off and one car that actually brings you around (because it is cheaper to maintain).