Dear You: Tale of Chinese Ex-Pats, Never Heard From Again, Resonates with Present Day Asian Audiences
Dear You
Rating: B
When a low-budget film ($2 million), made with non-professional actors in a dialect spoken by only 1% of China’s population, grosses US$290 million internationally, something special is in play.
Dear You works like a charm on some, especially the generations of Chinese expatriates in South East Asia.
The film has two main timelines, one in present day China, the other is set in old Thailand, when the country was still named Siam. Xiaowei (Zheng Runqi), an insolvent Chinese businessman goes on a trip to Thailand to look for his absentee grandfather who is believed to be a billionaire living with his other family.
Poorly paid Chinese expats dream of home in Dear You.
The grandfather, Musheng (Wang Yantong), left the Chaoshan region of southeastern China on a ship in the 1950s intending to pursue a better life for family of three kids and a wife he left behind.
He never returned home, although at the beginning, he dutifully sent “qiaopi”, letters containing heartfelt messages with remittance for love ones back home. The grandmother has been heartbroken for years and doesn’t want anything from this estranged husband, until the truth of his disappearance is uncovered by Xiaowei’s search.
The audience gets to witness the hardships of these expats, rarely featured in movies in the authentic dialect of Teochew. These ultimate underdogs toiling in foreign lands are suppressed by the local government, face violent bullying from local triads and are constantly on the brink of losing everything they earned.
The story brings tears to most South East Asian Chinese who have had first-hand experience or heard similar accounts from their ancestors. The Chaoshan customs and comfort food within this community of homesick individuals are truthfully and vividly depicted.
Things are not much better on home soil. Musheng’s wife Shurou (Wang Xiaohui) endures hardships raising their three young children as a single parent as well as an abandoned wife. She sacrifices her own happiness as a woman and resorts to living in loneliness with limited means.
The practice of parents working away from home still continues nowadays, mostly in rural China, when couples find work in the city, leaving their kids with the grandparents and visiting home once a year. Filipino and Indonesian maids also leave home to work as domestic helpers throughout the world. This story resonates with these lonely souls as well.
However, Dear You falls flat on characterization. Using non-professional actors is not an excuse as the two-dimensional characters are saint-like and not convincingly written as human beings. The character of Nanzhi (Li Sitong), the biracial Thai-Chinese daughter of a drunkard innkeeper, is another woman who sacrifices her whole life trying to care for people around her, dead and alive.
These characters never show any tangible internal struggle when facing intense dilemmas. Their good intentions arise so naturally, as if they were programmed to do good like a robot regardless of how bad the situation might become or how risky their actions were. This irrational act of kindness downgraded the film from a potentially great narrative to something like a TV movie-of-the-week.
If you want to learn about this historic chapter of Chinese expatriates, this film provides an entertaining and credible entry point. But it leaves you very little room for interpretations, as everything is spelled out in a very definite manner, like a text book through unreal characters who are used as vessels in sync with the director’s ideology.
Dear You. Directed by Lan Hongchun, Written by Lan Hongchun, Leng Yang and Zheng Xuanxuan. Starring Wang Yantong, Li Sitong, Zheng Runqi, Wang Xiaohui and Wu Shaoqing. In theatres Sep 4.