A Chinese box office hit sparks a debate about identity in Singapore
Key takeaways
- Golden Village Image caption, The Chinese movie Dear You was filmed almost entirely in Teochew, a dialect from China's Chaoshan region.
- 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.
- "Being Teochew, watching it in Teochew makes it even more special," says Wu Silin, a church worker.
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
Golden Village Image caption, The Chinese movie Dear You was filmed almost entirely in Teochew, a dialect from China's Chaoshan region. 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.