Dear You Teochew Film Sells Out in Singapore
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- Dear You sold out 4,800 tickets across eight additional screenings in roughly an hour after they went on sale Monday (June 22), after the initial eight screenings sold out in under two hours, with some fans saying they would cross into Johor Bahru to watch the original Teochew version.
- IMDA ruled a Mandarin-dubbed version would be used for general release in Singapore, restricting the Teochew version to festival and niche screenings, prompting the swift debate captured in Tan's commentary.
- Filmmakers Eric Khoo and Jack Neo wrote a forum letter calling the language policy "outdated," according to Tan, and CNA colleague Luke Lu also penned a commentary questioning whether restrictions on Chinese "dialects" in mainstream media should be revisited.
- Tan cites 2020 Singapore census data showing only 1.4% of Singaporean Chinese aged 5-34 use a Chinese "dialect" as their most frequent home language, compared with 31.6% of those aged 60 and above, to argue the fervor is grief over loss.
- The Speak Mandarin Campaign, launched in 1979, aimed to make Mandarin the unifying language for Singaporean Chinese, displacing Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and other non-Mandarin Chinese languages — which Tan notes are not technically "dialects."
- Tan argues the policy's decades of restriction inadvertently produced the very mystique and nostalgia now driving sold-out screenings, writing that the campaign "engineered the very obsession it was meant to prevent."
- Previous "dialect" films including the Thai film How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies and Jack Neo's Money No Enough drew similarly disproportionate Singaporean reactions, which Tan reads as part of the same pattern of mourning vanishing languages.
Why it matters: Tan's reframing matters because it tells regulators that the debate is not really about IMDA's Mandarin-dub ruling on Dear You — it is about what the 2020 census already confirms: Teochew and other Chinese "dialects" have collapsed to 1.4% usage among young Singaporean Chinese. If policymakers treat the sold-out screenings as a policy complaint, they will miss that the frenzy itself is evidence of how close to extinction these languages now sit.
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