Dear You, explained
給阿嬤的情書 · "A love letter to Grandma." The surprise Chinese hit of 2026 is spoken mostly in Teochew, a language most of its own audience can't understand. Two minutes of what you're watching.
Skip to the questionsWhat language is it in?
Mostly Teochew (潮州話), the language of the Chaoshan region in eastern Guangdong and of a diaspora of over five million people across Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and beyond. It's a Southern Min language, not a dialect of Mandarin, and not Cantonese; even in China most audiences watched with subtitles. More on the language.
What are the letters?
They're called 僑批 qiaopi, remittance letters. From the 1830s to the 1970s, Teochew men working overseas sent money home through a private courier network, and each payment came with a short letter. For a family in the village, the letter was proof that the man abroad was alive and still thinking of them. Over 160,000 survive, and UNESCO added them to its Memory of the World Register in 2013. The film's whole plot turns on who is really writing the letters, and why. The history of the letters.
Why Thailand?
Thailand has the largest Teochew population outside China. Bangkok's Chinatown was built by Teochew migrants, and a Teochew tax collector's son became king of Siam in 1767. A grandfather who left for Siam and never came back is not a fictional situation; it's the family history of millions of people. The diaspora, country by country.
Is it a true story?
The plot is fiction. The world is real: the port of Shantou, the courier network, the men who left and the women who waited.
Why it matters to us
Because it's the first time most of us have seen our language on a big screen, spoken by grandparents who sound like ours. Teochew is losing speakers every year; kids raised in Long Beach, Paris or Sydney can often understand it but not speak it. A film this big, in this language, is the reason this site exists.
Dialect is never going to be a liability as long as you have great ideas.
Lan Hongchun, director, to Variety
How it changed the law in Singapore
Since 1979, Singapore's Speak Mandarin policy has capped how many times a dialect film can be screened, and Chinese films have mostly reached cinemas dubbed into Mandarin. Dear You opened there on 18 June 2026 the same way: Mandarin dub in wide release, the Teochew original limited to eight screenings, about 4,800 tickets. They sold out within hours. Scalpers appeared. Grandchildren who had never heard the language on a screen wanted to take their grandparents. An MP filed a question in Parliament asking why the film had been dubbed at all, and the distributor released extra Teochew screenings batch by batch through the summer.
On 23 August, at the National Day Rally, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong named the film. The cap on dialect film screenings is gone, as long as a Mandarin-dubbed version also exists, and the dialect quotas on pay TV are gone entirely. Free-to-air television stays Mandarin. It is the first real loosening of the 1979 rules, and it happened because gaginang in Singapore refused to watch their own story in someone else's language.
Just found out you're Teochew?
You're not alone. Start with who the Teochew people are, look up the words your grandmother used, and come back. We're building a place for our own people.