SINGAPORE — In an era where blockbusters burn through budgets the size of small nations, a modest film shot largely with amateur actors and spoken almost entirely in the Teochew dialect has become an unlikely phenomenon. Love Letter to Ah Ma (给阿嬷的情书), the third feature by Chaoshan-born director Lan Hongchun, has surged past 600 million yuan at the Chinese box office and is now rippling through overseas Chinese communities—including Singapore—stirring memories of a shared, often painful, Nanyang past.

For many Singaporean Chinese, particularly those with Teochew roots, the film is less a period drama than a mirror held up to their own family histories.

The Story Buried in the Qiaopi

The film’s narrative engine is the qiaopi (侨批)—the “sojourners’ letters” that combined remittance and handwritten correspondence, which sustained countless families across the South China Sea from the late Qing dynasty until the 1980s. In 2013, these fragile documents were inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register, recognised as irreplaceable records of the Chinese diaspora.

Lan’s story opens in a Chaoshan village where Ye Shurou, a resolute grandmother, has spent half her life guarding the old family house. Her husband, Zheng Musheng, sailed for Siam in 1948 to seek his fortune, and for decades she has waited for his letters. Each qiaopi that arrives—carrying money and tender assurances—has been her psychological anchor, proof that across the “mountains and seas,” someone still remembers her.

Decades later, her grandson Xiaowei travels to Thailand to finally locate his grandfather and reunite the family. What he uncovers is a secret buried for half a century: Zheng Musheng was killed by thugs in 1960, only a dozen years after he left. The letters that continued to arrive, the money that kept the family alive, were not from him. They were ghostwritten by a stranger—Xie Nanzhi, a woman in Bangkok who had never met Ye Shurou, yet who, bound by an inexplicable sense of righteousness and kindness, sustained the correspondence for 18 years.

The revelation is devastating and transcendent at once. Two women, separated by geography and blood, forged an emotional bond that outlasted the man who was supposed to connect them.

“A Letter to All Overseas Chinese”

Lan, a former Phoenix Television documentarian who turned to filmmaking to preserve Teochew culture, did not stumble upon this story by accident. While shooting his documentary The Taste of Teochew Across the Four Seas, he spent years recording oral histories in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and France. These encounters seeded the emotional soil of Love Letter to Ah Ma.

To ensure authenticity, Lan and his team studied thousands of real qiaopi archived in Shantou, compiled a tens-of-thousands-of-word “Guide to Siamese Life,” and reconstructed everything from Bangkok’s old street layouts to the floral patterns on period clothing. Eighty-four-year-old Wu Shaoqing, who plays the elderly Ye Shurou, is not a professional actress; her own brother went to Nanyang, and when the cameras rolled, her tears required no direction.

Why Singaporeans Are Weeping in the Dark

The film has not yet secured a wide theatrical release in Singapore, but word is travelling fast through community screenings, social media clips, and whispered recommendations in Teochew-speaking households. Singapore’s Teochew community—one of the largest dialect groups in the Chinese Singaporean population—knows this history intimately. Many still have qiaopi tucked in drawers, or remember grandparents who waited by the door for the remittance-house courier.

The film’s re-creation of gongfu tea rituals, pickled olive dishes, and the Mid-Autumn “worship of the moon” are not exotic set dressing; they are half-remembered fragments of childhood Sundays. But the film’s power extends beyond dialect-group nostalgia. At its core is a universal immigrant story: the father who disappears into the machinery of a foreign land, the mother who becomes the unmovable centre of gravity at home, and the grandchildren who grow up knowing only the myth, never the man.

The Ghostwriter as Guardian

The character of Xie Nanzhi is the film’s moral thunderclap. A woman who inherits a dead man’s duty and keeps it for nearly two decades, she embodies a distinctly Chinese ideal of xin yi (信义)—faith and righteousness—that transcends kinship. In an age of transactional relationships, her choice to maintain a compassionate fiction feels almost radical.

Lan has called the film “a love letter not just to one grandmother, but to all overseas Chinese and to the homeland itself.” For Singaporean audiences, that love letter arrives with peculiar force. It suggests that the Chinese roots many here fear they have lost are not, in fact, lost; they are simply waiting, like Ye Shurou, in the old house, preserved in the handwriting of strangers who once believed that a promise made across the sea was as binding as blood.

Love Letter to Ah Ma is currently in negotiations for international release, with distributors in Southeast Asia expressing strong interest. For now, Singaporeans are finding their way to it by whatever means necessary—because some debts, like the ones inscribed in qiaopi, are not meant to remain unpaid.