How Lan Hongchun's Teochew film Dear You became a hit
Director Lan Hongchun's RMB14 million Teochew drama Dear You is China's second-highest-grossing film of 2026, with roughly $291 million worldwide. How Lan Hongchun's Teochew hit turned the forgotten 1950s qiaopi letter chain into a box-office surprise that closed the New York Asian Film Festival.
Key Takeaways
- Dear You, spoken almost entirely in Teochew, has earned about $285 million in China and $6 million abroad so far, trailing only Pegasus 3 this year.
- Made for RMB14 million ($2.1 million), the film is already more than 10 times Lan Hongchun's best-case China box-office forecast.
- Its drama hinges on qiaopi: the remittance-letter system that once needed four people to send a single message home from Bangkok.
- Well Go USA will release the film theatrically across North America on Sept. 4, after openings in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and more.
- Lan argues dialect is never a liability if the story, values and characters are strong enough.
For readers tracking China's surprise screen hits in our Streaming & TV Alerts hub, Dear You is the case study of the moment: a dialect picture that outran industry assumptions.
What is Dear You about, and why did qiaopi matter?
The film follows Xiaowei, a young man from Chaoshan who travels secretly to Thailand to find the grandfather who cut contact decades earlier. What he uncovers is rooted in the 1950s overseas Chinese community in Bangkok and in qiaopi—the letter-and-remittance system illiterate laborers used to stay tied to families back home.
To send a letter from Bangkok in the 1950s, an overseas Chinese laborer needed four people: himself, a scribe, a reader at the destination, and the person waiting to hear it aloud. Lan told Variety that qiaopi inspired the entire story, creating “three layers of opportunity to create dramatic tensions” as fidelity slips at each handoff.
Dear You is Lan's third Teochew-language feature and the closing chapter of what has been called his Teochew Trilogy, after Proud of Me (2018) and Back to Love (2022). Before shooting, he spent years gathering oral histories in Thailand and Malaysia; characters such as Musheng, Nanzhi and Ye Shurou are composites, not single portraits.
Why did a Teochew dialect film become a box-office hit?
Lan, who directed, wrote and edited the film, had projected RMB100 million to RMB200 million in China. The take has blown past that, and he says the market still looks headed toward RMB2 billion ($295.5 million). “It is 10 times more than what we have expected,” he said at the New York Asian Film Festival, where the film closed the 25th edition.
Debut star Li Sitong, who plays Xie Nanzhi—the woman whose letters become the story's quiet center—called the response “very surprising” after roughly three months of promotion tours. She grew up in Chaoshan, but like many peers she had felt Mandarin schooling push dialect aside; on set, Lan reshaped Mandarin-drafted lines into spoken Teochew cadences scene by scene.
For years, Lan had been told a Teochew film carried a built-in commercial ceiling. Dear You's run is already drawing fresh financing attention to dialect projects in Guangdong. “Dialect is never going to be a liability for you,” he said, “as long as you have great ideas, great storylines, great social values, emotional values and great characters.”
Where can audiences see Dear You next?
After a first international wave in Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei, further releases are planned for the U.K., France, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand. Damai Entertainment (formerly Alibaba Pictures) is handling the international rollout, with Well Go USA bringing the theatrical bow to North America on Sept. 4.
Li, whose debut alongside Wang Yantong has made them among China's most-discussed newcomers this year, said she sees the moment as a chance to learn and keep improving—not as a peak to fear.