The overwhelming success of Dear You (2026) in Singapore can be understood as a cultural phenomenon in itself. With its Teochew dialogue and cast of non-professional actors, the film stands in stark contrast to today’s mainstream Chinese-language cinema, becoming one of the year’s most unexpected box-office successes. The film gathered controversies: the alleged United Front agenda of using cultural-historical ties to cultivate political identification with the Chinese State, as reported by Lianhe Zaobao, and also discussions over Singapore’s dialect film policy—sparking a forty-minute debate in Parliament. Yet once these political and cultural storms have subsided, what remains of the film itself?
The film follows Den Bhagseng, who leaves for Southeast Asia in the 1950s in search of work to support his family, eventually settling in Thailand. His wife, Iap Sogriu, remains behind in China, waiting endlessly for his return. Their longing is transformed into strokes of ink across qiaopi—letters and remittances exchanged between overseas Chinese migrants and their families—carrying their affection across thousands of miles.
For decades, narratives of the Nanyang migration into Southeast Asia have remained largely absent from Chinese-language cinema, whether because of the enormous scale required to reconstruct such history or the practical challenges of production. Directed by Lan Hongchun, Dear You stands apart. Yet despite grounding itself in historical events, it conspicuously “edits out” some of the most sensitive aspects of that history. In remembering the past, it simultaneously forgets—and perhaps even resists—it. The more important question, therefore, is not whether the film is historically accurate, but how it uses cinematic images to naturalise a carefully selected historical experience as the “history” audiences come to believe.
At least half of the film unfolds through flashbacks, presenting audiences with a moving account of the hardships endured by overseas Chinese migrants. Yet the film’s extensive use of flashbacks is not merely a narrative device; it constitutes a form of memory politics. There is nothing inherently problematic about approaching grand historical events through the perspective of an ordinary individual. On the contrary, it is often one of cinema’s most effective storytelling strategies. The problem arises when the history being constructed is stripped of its complexity. At that point, are viewers participating in the construction of a collective memory of the Nanyang migration, or are they simply accepting a carefully curated narrative of suffering?
The politics of flashback in Dear You reveals cinema’s remarkable ability to shape collective memory. But whose memories do these flashbacks actually belong to? Are they Den Bhagseng’s, or Iap Sogriu’s? Presented from an almost omniscient perspective, these sequences gradually elevate Den Bhagseng’s personal experience into something representative of an entire historical era. In doing so, the film invites audiences not only to empathise with this past but also to internalise a specific historical imagination informed by each perspective’s own biases.
The China depicted in Dear You resembles a historical space emptied of politics and social conflict. Although the narrative spans the period from the 1950s through the 1970s, the characters appear to inhabit a parallel world untouched by the Great Leap Forward, the Great Chinese Famine, the Cultural Revolution, or the ideological tensions of the Cold War. These events need not dominate the narrative, but their near absence deprives the historical setting of much of its social and political complexity. As a result, history becomes little more than the backdrop for nostalgia and personal suffering, rather than the very force shaping the characters’ lives. Such selective narration inevitably invites political readings.
Ultimately, Dear You gestures towards something far more complex than a simple story of migration to Nanyang. It raises broader questions about the relationship between history, memory, and cinematic construction. As flashbacks transform individual memories into historical narratives, and as history itself becomes selectively organised and narrated, what the film constructs is not merely a story about the past but a collective historical imagination.
Outside the cinema, the political debates surrounding Dear You continue to unfold, with accusations of United Front influence remaining fiercely contested. When the historical imagination constructed by the film diverges from lived historical experience, audiences are placed in an uncomfortable position. Southeast Asian viewers may readily identify with their ancestors’ painful experiences of migration to Nanyang, yet how can they grapple with the political implications embedded within the film?
What Dear You ultimately leaves behind is not a complete history but a carefully selected—and carefully sanitised—historical imagination. As the complexities that resist the film’s narrative are continually set aside, the controversies surrounding it are repeatedly reduced to the single word “politics.” Yet it is precisely this invocation of “politics” that obscures the more urgent questions: How do we remember history? And who gets to decide how history should be remembered?
Thinking about where Teochew cinema can go, Dear You might have charted new heights and possibilities but central political questions deserve to be considered too.
Written in Chinese and translated by Lee Peng Ming, edited by Daryl Cheong.