Dear You Film Triggers Wave of Teochew Family Reunions
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- Dear You grossed nearly 2 billion yuan (US$296 million) at the domestic box office, becoming one of China's highest-grossing films of the year, and a Thai-dubbed version is set for release on Aug 6.
- The Chaozhou Volunteer Association for Reuniting Overseas Chinese Families, a 3,000-strong volunteer network across Guangdong, Fujian, and Jiangxi provinces, has recorded 1,097 successful family reunions since founding in May 2016 — of which 145 involved overseas Chinese from Southeast Asia, Canada, France, and the US.
- Since the film's regional release in June, ancestry search requests from Singaporeans and Malaysians jumped from 1-2 per month to dozens, and 10 families from Singapore and Malaysia have already been reunited since its release.
- WeChat is the operation's backbone — volunteers exchange faded photographs, genealogy records, grave inscriptions, and voice messages in real time across groups spanning thousands of kilometers, with the fastest searches completed in half an hour and the slowest taking years.
- Co-founder Zeng Jianpeng said the work is entirely voluntary, with around 200-300 active volunteers juggling full-time jobs, and the group verifying matches through on-the-ground checks with clan elders rather than charging family members.
- Volunteer Lu Limiao, a 30-year-old rehabilitation therapist from Jieyang, joined the group after it helped her own grandmother — sold as a child to a family in Jiangxi during the 1940s turmoil — find her childhood home before she died in 2019 "with no regrets."
- Malaysian lawyer Sammi Yeung traveled to Chaoshan from Kluang, Johor, with five family members including her grandfather only to find her grandfather's cousin — who had exchanged letters with him for years — had fallen ill a week earlier and could no longer eat or speak.
Why it matters: The film Dear You has converted passive diaspora interest into active searches at a scale the volunteer network has never seen — taking inbound requests from 1-2 per month to dozens — and because the group's 1,097 successful reunions rely on elderly villagers who remember pre-modern place names and administrative boundaries, the binding constraint is mortality: searches started now race against the fading memories of the oldest residents.
