A Chinese box office hit sparks a debate about identity in Singapore

A nostalgic tale about family, hope and hardship, Dear You has swept the box office in China this summer - and opened an unexpected conversation about identity thousands of miles away in Singapore.

The sleeper hit was filmed almost entirely in Teochew, a language from China's Chaoshan region which is still spoken among older generations of Chinese in South East Asia.

But when the movie hit Singaporean cinemas this month, many were dismayed to learn that most of the screenings would be dubbed into Mandarin - the lingua franca of China and one of Singapore's four official languages, along with English.

"Being Teochew, watching it in Teochew makes it even more special," says Wu Silin, a church worker. She and her mother watched Dear You last week, after snagging tickets to one of just eight special Teochew screenings. The tickets reportedly sold out in less than two hours.

When the film is being screened in its original language in China, why not in Singapore, where Teochew is still spoken by many among the older generation of ethnic Chinese? That's what many locals are asking.

The film has inadvertently sparked a debate over the government's long-standing push for Chinese Singaporeans to speak Mandarin instead of other languages, or what they call dialects, from China.

What began as an attempt to unify the Chinese community in Singapore has proven so effective that, some argue, it has driven dialects like Teochew, Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka into an irreversible decline.

Authorities have responded to the impassioned calls for the movie to be screened in Teochew. "We hear the calls for dialect films to be more freely screened in cinemas," Singapore's information ministry said in a statement on Monday, promising to "take a more flexible approach".

As people commiserate online, some have shared plans to travel to neighbouring Malaysia to catch Dear You in Teochew. Another eight shows - nearly 5,000 tickets - went on sale on Monday, and sold out within two hours, local media reported. On Thursday, 50 more screenings were approved in Teochew.

To many Singaporeans, Dear You is a bittersweet journey into their own past, told in a tongue that has crossed the seas and entered a new era.

But even those who don't understand Teochew have been seeking out the movie in its original form.

"I think sometimes it's just the vibe," says Anna Zhang, a 35-year-old from Beijing who moved to Singapore for work.

She watched it in Teochew with subtitles, she says, as she would any foreign film.

"I'm not saying these translated versions are not good, but I do feel there is a bit of difference … It doesn't feel like this is coming from the original character."

With a modest budget and a cast of mostly rookie actors, Dear You tells the story of a young man from a southern Chinese village who sets off to Thailand to find his grandfather.

His grandfather had fled their village in 1948 to avoid being conscripted in the civil war that was upending millions of lives. He ended up as a trishaw rider in Thailand in the 1950s, living in a hostel with other Chinese migrants and sending letters filled with longing to his wife and children back home.

Dear You, and especially in Teochew, strikes at the root of identity because it is set against a historical wave of migration when millions of Chinese undertook perilous sea journeys to reach Singapore and other parts of South East Asia between the 19th and mid-20th Century.

"Dialects have always been the root of where the Singaporean Chinese come from. Mandarin, I would say, is mostly a superimposed language that we learn from schools," says Lee Cher Leng, associate professor of Chinese studies at the National University of Singapore.

"I think it's really interesting that a small movie like that would bring [up] something so impactful."

Dialects were once spoken widely among Singapore's Chinese community, which makes up more than 70% of the country's population.

But they disappeared from the airwaves in the 1980s after the government launched a campaign to encourage Chinese residents to use Mandarin instead of their various tongues.

Dialects have since been dubbed over in cinemas and scrubbed from radio and television programmes.

It was part of a broader bilingual policy adopted in the 1960s, which stipulated English to be spoken by all Singaporeans, along with their "mother tongue", a language determined by their ethnicity.

At the time the Speak Mandarin Campaign was launched, nearly 70% of Singaporeans spoke one of several Chinese dialects at home.

By 2020, that figure had plummeted to 8.7%.

Many of those curbs remain in place today, even though English is now cited as the most comfortable language for nearly half of Singaporeans.

Since the 1990s, the Speak Mandarin Campaign has shifted its focus to English-educated ethnic Chinese, and away from those who speak dialects.

"The campaign has achieved what it set out to do - it has established Mandarin as the common language among Chinese Singaporeans and dismantled the dialect landscape," reads a letter by two filmmakers published last week in local newspaper the Straits Times. "Screening a dialect film is now no different from screening a French or Malay film."

"What better way to confirm the success of the Speak Mandarin campaign than to relax this rule completely," they asked, to "signal a maturity" in dealing with cultural diversity among Chinese Singaporeans?

This has echoed across social media and commentaries over the past week, drawing even politicians into the conversation. In a post on Facebook, opposition MP Dennis Tan hailed dialects as "the living, breathing repositories of our forefathers' journeys, customs, and identity".

The discussion looks set to continue, after two lawmakers said they had asked authorities about screening movies in their original dialect.

"Actually a lot of people can't speak dialect [anymore]," Wu says. "I think it's time they revisit this policy. If they want to retain some of our culture, then I think it's important."

It's not just the dialects that are disappearing, but also the traditions that came with them.

One of the things Wu was touched to see in Dear You is a Teochew ritual that she herself followed. When she turned 15, a culturally significant age in the community, her parents gave her a gift to mark her coming-of-age, known in Teochew as "leaving the garden".

When her niece turned 15 last year, Wu says there was no such celebration.

Still, young Singaporeans have shown growing interest in connecting with their heritage, from learning the dwindling dialects of their grandparents to taking lessons and organising trips to ancestral hometowns in China.

But Tan Ying Ying, an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University who studies dialects, isn't optimistic that this will reverse the trend.

"Young people who are learning them now … You can learn it like a foreign language and learn it for fun. But if no-one is speaking it, you're not going to be able to retain it," she says.

The uproar over Dear You, Tan says, is perhaps "like grieving a loss".

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