How Lan Hongchun’s Teochew Film ‘Dear You’ Turned a Forgotten Postal Tradition Into China’s Unlikely Hit: ‘Dialect Is Never Going to Be a Liability as Long as You Have Great Ideas’

Jul 28, 2026 7:44am PT How Lan Hongchun’s Teochew Film ‘Dear You’ Turned a Forgotten Postal Tradition Into China’s Unlikely Hit: ‘Dialect Is Never Going to Be a Liability as Long as You Have Great Ideas’

By Naman Ramachandran

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Naman Ramachandran

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Four people. One letter. An ocean between them.

To send a letter home from Bangkok in the 1950s, an overseas Chinese laborer needed four people: himself, a scribe to put his words on paper, a reader to decode it at the destination and the person waiting to hear it read aloud. Lan Hongchun built a $291 million film around that chain – and everything that could go wrong inside it.

“Dear You,” which closed the 25th New York Asian Film Festival, is a RMB14 million ($2.1 million) dialect picture spoken almost entirely in Teochew, rooted in a form of correspondence most audiences under 50 couldn’t identify. It has become the second-highest-grossing film in China this year, after “Pegasus 3,” earning $285 million locally with a further $6 million from its first wave of international markets.

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