Generations Connected Across an Ocean

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MOVIE REVIEWS
Dear You (Gei a ma de qing shu)
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Genre: Drama, Family
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 58m
Director: Lan Hongchun
Writers: Lan Hongchun, Leng Yang, Zheng Xuanxuan
Cast: Li Sitong, Wang Yantong, Wu Shaoqing, Zheng Runqi, Wang Xiaohui, Zhao Shuguang, Usha Seamkhum
Where to Watch: in select theaters September 4, 2026

RAVING REVIEW: The first stretch of DEAR YOU is a lot funnier than what you would expect a tearjerker like this to be. Xiaowei isn’t traveling to Thailand because of some sudden interest in his family history. He’s in debt, desperate, and heard enough about a wealthy grandfather to see the trip as a possible solution to his own problems. Zheng Runqi plays this role without making Xiaowei unbearable, and director Lan Hongchun lets the film's contemporary part begin with enough lightheartedness that the movie initially feels lighter than it ultimately is.

That becomes vitally important once Xiaowei’s search starts pulling him into a past he barely understands. His grandmother, Ye Shurou, spent decades connected to a husband who left China for Southeast Asia, with letters and money serving as one of the few bridges between lives separated by an enormous distance. What Xiaowei expects to be a relatively simple hunt for a missing relative becomes an excavation of choices made long before he was born. The more he learns, the less his own problems seem capable of explaining why he needed to make the trip.

Lan doesn’t rush that moment. DEAR YOU moves between the present day and a generation living through migration, separation, and uncertainty, gradually allowing the past to occupy more of the movie. The structure could have become cumbersome, especially with several versions of characters appearing across different periods, but the relationships remain easy to follow. There’s a purpose to withholding parts of the family history because Xiaowei is learning it in roughly the same order we are. The movie isn’t simply flashing backward to explain something. It’s asking him to reconsider assumptions he has inherited without ever questioning them.

The qiaopi (the letters) themselves make that especially effective. Historically, these weren’t ordinary letters. They paired correspondence with money sent home by Chinese emigrants, carrying support alongside whatever words could fit on the page. DEAR YOU understands what an extraordinary emotional object each one is. A letter can prove someone remembered home. A remittance can show that someone continued providing for a family despite being thousands of miles away. Neither necessarily explains what that person’s life actually became after leaving.

That gap between what a family knows and what really happened gives the movie so much to hold onto, so much impact. Migration isn’t treated as a dramatic departure followed by an eventual reunion. Years accumulate. People build lives because they don’t have any other choice, while the people left behind build different lives around absence. Children grow older, spouses wait, communities change, and relationships begin existing partly through memory. DEAR YOU is particularly good at recognizing how one person’s decision can continue shaping descendants who weren’t alive when it was made.

Li Sitong gives the performance that holds all of this together. As Xie Nanzhi, she avoids turning kindness into saintliness. There’s a certainty to the character, along with enough humor and personality that her importance never depends entirely on what she does for other people. Wang Yantong is equally convincing as Zheng Musheng, bringing sincerity to a man carrying responsibilities in more than one direction. Neither performance strains for significance. Their scenes together are often the ones that make the later emotional connection all possible.

That restraint is even more impressive considering how openly sentimental DEAR YOU eventually becomes. Lan clearly wants the audience to cry, and by the final stretch there isn’t much ambiguity about that objective. Music rises at precisely the right moments, revelations arrive with enough breathing room for their meaning to settle. It occasionally pushes a little harder than necessary. The performances have already conveyed much of the emotion before the filmmaking begins, underscoring it. It’s an interesting progression; the film knows what it wants to do and what means it has to portray the story.

The same generosity that makes the movie so moving also smooths over some difficult questions. Sacrifice, loyalty and endurance are treated with enormous respect, particularly when it comes to women. There are moments when DEAR YOU comes close to romanticizing how much women were expected to accept while men traveled, worked and established lives elsewhere. Ye Shurou and Xie Nanzhi are far more interesting than passive symbols of devotion, and the movie gives them an agency that matters. Its admiration for selflessness can occasionally make painful limitations placed on women feel nobler than they probably were to the women living through them.

Xiaowei's initial motivation lends the present-day portions a surprisingly strong comic vibe, and watching his attitude shift provides an accessible entry point into unfamiliar history. Eventually, though, he functions more as the person uncovering the story than as a character whose own life receives equivalent attention. DEAR YOU becomes considerably more interested in what happened decades earlier, which makes sense emotionally, although the present day never completely regains the personality it has at the beginning.

Those weaknesses don’t undo how effectively Lan makes a culturally specific story understandable without taking away what makes it specific. Much of the film is spoken in Teochew, with Mandarin and Thai also mixed in, and that variety is so important to the story's architecture. These aren’t interchangeable locations populated by characters who happen to have crossed a border. Language, food, customs, and community create a sense of home that migration brought with these people, even when physical return wasn’t possible.

That may also explain why a modest production built largely around unfamiliar performers became such an enormous word-of-mouth success in China. DEAR YOU never looks like a movie engineered to become a phenomenon. Its appeal comes from something much more basic. People recognize parents, grandparents, and family stories in characters who spent years doing what had to be done without necessarily explaining it to the generations that followed.

For viewers without that personal connection to Teochew migration, Lan provides another way in. Most families have stories that grow shorter each time they’re passed down. Details disappear, motivations are simplified, and eventually an entire life can be reduced to a sentence that younger relatives accept as fact. Xiaowei starts DEAR YOU thinking he knows who his grandfather was and why finding him matters. What he discovers is that understanding a family requires more than knowing who belonged to whom.

By the time the letters have given up everything they’re capable of revealing, the title feels less like it belongs to any single relationship than it did at the beginning. DEAR YOU is sentimental, occasionally too eager to guarantee the response it’s already earned, and somewhat gentler toward sacrifice than its history deserves. None of that kept it from getting to me. Lan Hongchun made a family drama in which the past isn’t over simply because everyone involved has grown old. Someone only has to open the right letter.

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[photo courtesy of WELL GO USA ENTERTAINMENT, DAMAI ENTERTAINMENT, KING ANT PICTURES, SHENZHEN YUGUANG FILM]

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