What the Letters Did Not Say

A history behind Dear You, China's biggest box-office hit this spring

The movie is called Dear You (给阿嬷的情书), and if you happened to be in any Chinese city this past week you could not have missed it. The posters were everywhere. By last Tuesday the film had crossed 600 million yuan at the box office, and the social media platforms were full of people weeping into their phones. The story is a simple one, as the stories that make people weep usually are: a grandson travels to Thailand to find the man who wrote love letters to his grandmother for half a century, and discovers that the man died years ago, and that a stranger — a woman with no obligation to anyone — had carried on the correspondence in his name, writing the letters, sending the money, keeping a beautiful lie alive across two families and eighteen years.

The film is shot almost entirely in the Teochew dialect, and the leads are not actors. This is the kind of detail that critics describe as “raw” or “authentic,” and in this case they are not wrong. It is a good movie. It made me cry, and I am not a person who says that lightly.

But there is another story here, and it lives in the silence between the lines of those old letters.

The letters at the center of the film are qiaopi (侨批) — a word that means, in the Teochew and Hokkien dialects, simply "correspondence." But qiaopi were never simple. They were letters and remittances bundled together, stitched into a single transaction by the overseas Chinese communities of Southeast Asia who had gone abroad to work the docks and the rubber plantations and the tin mines of Malaya and Siam, and who needed some way to send money home to the villages of Guangdong and Fujian.

In 2013, UNESCO inscribed the qiaopi archive into the Memory of the World Register. Hong Kong sinologist Jao Tsung-I called them the "Dunhuang of the overseas Chinese" — a comparison to the cave manuscripts that preserved Chinese civilization through centuries of chaos. The Shantou archive alone holds more than 92,000 letters.

Before there were agencies to carry them, the letters moved by human beings called shuike (水客) — “water guests.” These were men who made the crossing between China and Southeast Asia on the monsoon winds, part courier, part itinerant entrepreneur, part village hero, ferrying money and notes and, on occasion, clothes, food, and people. By 1849, there were some two hundred of them working out of Singapore alone. As migration grew and steam ships made the crossing more predictable, the shuike gave way to formal remittance houses, the qiaopiju, which eventually, in 1979, were absorbed into the Bank of China, and the tradition ended.

What the film does not tell you — because films that aspire to move you rarely stop to complicate you — is what it meant in practice to have “overseas connections” in China during the decades those letters were being written.

It was not merely a sentimental condition. It was a political one.

The Letters Themselves

There is also something the film elides about the letters themselves, before we even get to politics.

Many of the men who sent qiaopi could not write. Most early migrants were illiterate or semi-literate, and when they made their remittances, some could manage only the date and the amount. For anything more, they sat down at small stalls that professional letter-writers operated from the five-foot ways of Singapore shophouses, on stools set under the shade of a tree or at the base of a wall, equipped with a table, paper, brush, and ink. They spoke their feelings aloud. The letter-writer turned them into classical Chinese. This means that the man who dictated the letter and the man who wrote it were not the same man. The elegant phrases that appear in the film — the sea that thinking of you makes small (江海万里，心中念你，便不觉遥远) — might the scribe’s language, not Musheng’s.

The film knows this, in its way. In one letter, the husband writes to his wife: I have been practicing my brushwork lately, and have learned to write your name. It is clumsy still, but a few more days and I think I will have it. It is one of the most quietly devastating lines in the movie — a man in middle age, laboring over the four strokes of his wife's name on a scrap of paper in a rented room in Bangkok.

At home, the problem ran the other way. The women waiting in the villages were often illiterate too, and so a third figure enters the story: the phoekha (批脚), the “feet of the letters,” the local delivery men who hand-carried the envelopes from the district agencies to the village doors and, in many households, read them aloud. The intimacy of the qiaopi — that sense of a private voice crossing the water — passed, in practice, through at least two strangers before it reached anyone’s ears. The film’s premise of a woman writing letters in a dead man’s name is, in this light, less an extraordinary act than a variation on something ordinary: the qiaopi was always, to some degree, a collaborative fiction.

There is one more thing worth noting about the letters as physical objects. They were paid for by weight. Paper cost money. The men writing them had very little. So they crammed their characters to the margins, filling every scrap of tissue-thin paper, leaving no room for extraneous sentiment. The formal, courtly prose of the qiaopi was partly a function of compression: classical Chinese says more in fewer characters than the vernacular. Beauty, in this case, was also thrift.

And then there is the question of who, precisely, the letters were addressed to.

By custom, a qiaopi followed a strict hierarchy of recipients. If the paternal grandmother was living, one did not address it to the mother. If the mother was living, one did not address it to the wife. A young son ranked above the mother in the right to receive the envelope. More than sixty percent of qiaopi were addressed to paternal grandparents or parents, and predominantly to men. A love letter addressed directly to a wife — the film’s central premise — was, by the conventions of the form, already an act of deviation.

The Letter-Writing Campaign

All of which is to say that the qiaopi, before the state got involved, was already a more complicated document than the film suggests. And the state did get involved.

In the early 1950s, Beijing had a problem. It needed foreign currency — desperately, systematically — and the remittances flowing through the qiaopi networks were one of the few reliable sources. Records from the Gazetteer of Chaozhou suggest that in some years nearly half the region’s population subsisted partly on money sent from abroad. So the government launched what the historian Glen Peterson, in his study of the PRC’s overseas Chinese policies, calls a letter-writing campaign.

The stated purpose was humanitarian. The war years had scattered families across two continents; countless households in Guangdong and Fujian had lost contact with relatives in Southeast Asia for more than a decade, and many did not know whether their men had survived the Japanese occupation at all. In her 1950 New Year’s address, He Xiangning, Chair of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission, expressed hope that the campaign would allay migrants’ suspicions about the new communist government and encourage the resumption of remittances. Local post offices organized elderly residents with long memories to assist in locating the missing. By 1957, authorities reported that some 500,000 letters had been sent to overseas relatives from Guangdong alone, reuniting several thousand families each year.

But the campaign was never only what it said it was. Opening the letters also gave the state its first systematic intelligence on the scale and geography of Chinese transnationalism — who was where, how much money was flowing, what the communities in Bangkok and Singapore and San Francisco looked like from the inside. And as local governments launched their own parallel campaigns focused explicitly on soliciting remittances, the letters from home began to change in character. In Taishan, county delegates resolved in September 1950 that each representative must write at least one letter to an overseas relative explaining the importance of sending money home; they even placed advertisements in New York’s Meizhou Huaqiao Ribao urging Taishan expatriates to remit.

What arrived in the mailboxes of Chinese laundrymen and dockworkers and gardeners in San Francisco and Vancouver and New York was often something closer to a ransom note. The letters described illness, poverty, imprisonment — and ended with an urgent, specific demand for cash. In some cases the demands were genuine expressions of desperation; in others, as Peterson documents, they were the product of local cadres who had discovered that threatening to harm relatives was an efficient way to extract foreign currency from people too far away to verify the claims. Chen Yong, a thirty-five-year-old laundry worker in New York’s Chinatown, received one such letter and handed over his entire life savings of $700. When a second letter arrived demanding $1,100 more, he became so distraught that neighbors called the police. When officers arrived, Chen came at them with a knife. They shot him dead.

The stories was big enough to win a Pulitzer. George De Carvalho of the San Francisco Chronicle received the 1952 Prize for Local Reporting for his investigation of what the prize committee called "a 'ransom racket' extorting money from Chinese in the United States for relatives held in Red China."

By December 1951, more than 1,100 Chinese in the United States had signed a letter to Mao Zedong and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission. “The peasant associations in the villages have begun to charge Overseas Chinese families with absolutely groundless crimes,” they wrote, “putting them on trial, torturing them, and compelling them to pay large sums of money by a specified date … atrocious murders have often followed.” Reuters reported that at least one million dollars had been “extorted” from Chinese in New York City in the preceding two months alone. The US Treasury dispatched agents to Chinese communities in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco to collect testimony. The letters — the same letters that the campaign had been designed to produce, the same letters that were supposed to carry family news and filial devotion across the Pacific — were put on public exhibition in Los Angeles in early 1952 as evidence of communist extortion.

The FBI went further, bringing federal charges against the editors of New York's pro-PRC Chinese-language newspaper Meizhou Huaqiao Ribao — the same paper that had earlier run the Taishan delegates' paid advertisement urging expatriates to remit — for allegedly assisting Chinese Americans in sending money to the mainland. The New York Times covered the indictment on its front page.

He Xiangning had spoken of encouraging overseas Chinese to feel connected to the new China. The connection had been made. It simply did not feel the way she had described it.

Families Back Home

Having a relative abroad was not a mark of family connection. It was a liability. The state needed the remittances these men sent home; it did not trust the families who received them. This tension ran all the way into the bedroom.

In the new China after 1949, the 1950 Marriage Law gave women the right to sue for divorce if a husband had “abandoned” them for more than three years. Local authorities in Taishan, Meixian and other emigrant counties promptly announced that wives whose overseas husbands had not returned to China in three years were now free to petition — and that such petitions would be readily granted. According to a 1954 classified report circulated to Overseas Chinese affairs cadres in Guangdong, the frequency of marital disputes in transnational households had by then grown “extremely serious,” with divorce petitions rising in virtually every qiaoxiang across the province.

The government’s response revealed where its priorities lay. Its Overseas Chinese affairs officials condemned — in the same breath — both the “patriarchal clan system” that kept wives in permanent waiting and the women who had simply stopped waiting without filing the correct paperwork. The 1954 State Council directive on overseas Chinese matrimonial disputes was explicit: maintaining a family in China was “one of the material foundations of the overseas Chinese’s connection to the motherland,” and disputes should be handled with “appropriate consideration for the overseas Chinese.” The remittances mattered more than the marriages. Women who had waited years — sometimes decades, sometimes for husbands who had long since built second families in Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur — found that the state’s interest in their liberation extended only as far as it did not inconvenience the men sending money home.

During the land reform campaigns of the early 1950s, overseas Chinese households were supposed to be protected. The Agrarian Reform Law of June 1950 had specified that there be "due consideration for the interests of overseas Chinese (华侨所有的土地和房屋，应本照顾侨胞利益的原则)," and Fang Fang, then chair of the Guangdong Land Reform Committee, had explicitly cautioned a careful approach to overseas Chinese property — aware that on the eve of land reform, emigrants owned about one-fifth of all land in Guangdong.

In 1952, Mao sent Tao Zhu to take over from Fang Fang. In Frank Dikötter's account of this period in The Tragedy of Liberation, Tao Zhu had made his name ruthlessly suppressing all opposition in Guangxi — some compared him to a tank, crushing all enemies in his path. In May 1952 alone, over 6,000 cadres in Guangdong were demoted or persecuted for having followed what Beijing deemed an incorrect party line. In practice, as Peterson documents, many qiaojuan households were wrongly classified as landlords and subjected to the expropriation of land and houses; a special provincial commission was eventually established in 1957 to handle the outstanding property disputes. When families could not produce their grain quota, they wrote to their husbands and fathers and brothers overseas and begged for more money. Some men had stopped writing back at all — not from indifference, but because their host countries' governments, edgy with Cold War suspicion, were watching every Chinese man who maintained contact with the People's Republic.

In 1958, local cadres organized drives to collect overseas Chinese funds for the backyard steel furnaces of the Great Leap Forward. Overseas Chinese homes were cleared to make room for communal canteens. In 1963, the Four Cleanups campaign (四清运动) specifically targeted overseas Chinese households as objects of investigation; some production brigades subjected these families to public denunciations, searches, fines, and confiscation.

Then came the Cultural Revolution. By 1966, the provincial government had suspended the entire overseas remittance supply system. Families with foreign connections were, in the official language of the time, “reactionary social foundations (反动的社会基础).” In 1969, Guangdong province formalized this logic into a set of six regulations governing cadres with overseas ties — known informally as the "Six Black Rules" (黑六条) — stipulating that anyone who maintained political or economic contact with relatives abroad was to be "dealt with severely," and that no one with overseas or Hong Kong connections would henceforth be recruited as a cadre. Their letters were read. Their money was seized. Their homes were ransacked for the "four olds" (四旧). Some, unable to endure the investigations and the struggle sessions, took their own lives. It was not until 1978, when Liao Chengzhi — who as a senior overseas Chinese affairs official had spent decades trying to protect these same families — formally repudiated the Cultural Revolution's treatment of the overseas Chinese, that "overseas connections" ceased to be a crime.

**

There is a letter in the historical record — not from the film, but from the actual archive — dated 1927, sent from a man in Indonesia to his family in Chaoshan. In the center of the page he had written a single traditional character: nán (难). Difficult. The left side bore a poem:

The road to the foreign country is long and far away / heartbreak, morning and night / the sights of home become an empty dream / when will this sorrow ever pass?

(迢递客乡去路遥，断肠暮暮复朝朝。风光梓里成虚梦，惆怅何时始得消。)

He was writing in 1927, before any of the campaigns, before the land reform or the steel drives or the Cultural Revolution. He was writing about the ordinary difficulty of being far from home — a difficulty that belonged to him alone, that no institution could name or preserve.

In 2013, UNESCO inscribed the qiaopi archive into the Memory of the World Register. The letters became heritage. They became, in the words of Shuhua Chen, a scholar who has written on qiaopi culture, a “collective memory” — curated, celebrated, institutionalized. What the process of institutionalization cannot easily accommodate is what the letters actually were: the residue of private suffering, of people separated by distance and history and policy, whose feelings did not become less painful for being preserved.

Chen describes a scene in her 2024 paper. She is visiting an elderly woman in Chaoshan — a woman in her eighties, one of the last generation with living memory of waiting for the letters. The television is on. A news anchor is reporting, in excited tones, that the qiaopi archive has been nominated for UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register — a great success, the anchor says, a cultural triumph. She turns to look at the old woman. She is crying.

Chen notes the incongruity: the anchor’s language of collective heritage and shared memory, and the old woman’s private, silent tears. Whose memory, she asks, is the "Memory of the World" preserving? The question does not get answered, because it cannot be.

The film will soon open overseas, the director says. He wants the diaspora to see it. No doubt they will, and no doubt many of them will cry. Some of them will be the grandchildren of the people who sent those letters. They will know, or suspect, or half-remember from something a grandparent once said in a tired moment, that the story has another side.

The grandmother in the film is called Ye Shurou. She is a woman who receives her letters with joy, who presses them to her chest, who seems to live in a world in which a letter from abroad is only ever a love letter. One Chinese critic, writing on Douban after the film opened, noted that she is either an exception or a very lucky woman. I do not think the film is lying about her. I think it is telling a true story about a real kind of love. But it is telling that story while carefully removing everything that surrounded it — the cadres, the campaigns, the confiscations, the hierarchy of addresses that put a young son above a wife, the scribes who supplied the eloquence, the delivery men who supplied the voice.

A movie cannot hold that side and still be a movie. That is not an accusation. It is simply the nature of the form.

The UNESCO archive has, depending on how you count the copies, somewhere between 92,000 and 170,000 letters. The ones that survived are the ones that could be kept. We do not know how many were destroyed — burned by families who thought the foreign handwriting on the envelope would bring the cadres to the door, or seized during house searches and never returned, or simply never written in the first place because a man in a rubber plantation in Malaya had heard enough about what happened to the families of people like him.

The letters, at least, are in the archive. The archive is there for anyone who wants to read it. Ninety-two thousand envelopes, each one thin as a held breath.