Life is Like an Olive

This piece discusses key moments from Dear You. If you have not seen it yet, you may want to experience the story first.

We are often prompted by history to admire the sacrifice of our ancestors, to be grateful for their struggles. While Dear You certainly did make me feel admiration and gratitude, I felt that it also asked a deeper question: how do you find meaning in a life shaped as much by the things never came to be as by what did? How do you live alongside the knowledge of that unrealized potential?

Before watching the movie, I stayed true to the promise that I’d made to myself many years ago - that I would watch movies before reading any reviews. Even reviews that are intended as a spoiler-free watch / don’t watch recommendation. Apart from brief comments from friends and the occasional headline I kept my mind clear of information so that I may form my own thoughts. I was pleasantly surprised by a beautifully personal story woven skillfully into the history of Southeast Asia.

From one point of view, “Dear You” reads as a tribute to the generations of Teochew men who left their homes for Nanyang (Malaysia, Thailand and beyond) to escape poverty, war, political upheaval and, for many, forced conscription. They supported their families who stayed back in China through qiaopi - letters that carried well wishes, money, hope and proof that across the sea their family bond endured.

The film follows Zheng Musheng, one such migrant whose letters become the thread that connected several generations across China and Thailand. Through them, Dear You reconstructs a chapter of history that many overseas Chinese families carry in fragments but rarely see depicted on screen. Musheng and the other migrants endure exhausting work, uncertain livelihoods, and the challenges of building a life in a new country during a period of war, migration and changing national identities. A particularly memorable story thread in the film follows Musheng’s determination to teach children of other Teochew migrants like him to read and write Chinese. The film depicts the school existing under constant threat of closure, forcing its teachers and students to hide from policemen or resort to bribery.

Having spent much of my life in Malaysia and Singapore, I had absorbed fragments of this history almost by osmosis. Dear You expanded this knowledge and wrapped it in a real story that I could feel and relate to. I came away with a much deeper appreciation for the sacrifices that shaped so many Chinese communities across Southeast Asia, and like with most historical movies, gratitude that I happened to be born into a far more peaceful world.

So the history is beautifully conveyed. But that’s not what the film really stayed with me for. As I exited the screening, there were two big questions floating around in my mind.

How do you live a good life when every path before you requires great sacrifice? And how do you make peace with the life you never got to have?

Every major character in the film longs for a life that they never got to live.

More than anything, Zheng Musheng wants to return home to Shurou. He never does.

Ye Shurou longs for an ordinary life together with her husband. Instead, she raises the family on her own, and is led to believe for decades that Musheng left her for another woman, never knowing how fiercely loyal he remained until the very end.

Xie Nanzhi perhaps longs for a family of her own without having to leave her father alone, and a future where Musheng stays alive and returns to his family. That future never arrives either.

At first glance, their lives seem overwhelmingly tragic; defined by separation, loneliness, misunderstandings, political upheaval and accidents of fate. The cruelest moment in the film for me, is the photograph of Musheng with the school kids and Nanzhi arriving without its accompanying letter, changing decades of relationships through no one’s fault at all. It made me realize how often history is shaped as much by timing, distance and typhoons as by villains and heroes.

I also found myself frustrated with Musheng at many points in the film.

Why do you keep getting involved?

Why risk yourself again and again?

Just come home.

But eventually I realized that’s just who he is. He cannot ignore injustice when it happens in front of him. Asking him not to get involved would be asking him to become someone else. His virtues and his tragedies come from the same place, something that I feel is true of many people. Often the qualities that we admire most in someone are inextricably linked to the qualities that make their lives more difficult.

This brings us to one of the film’s most beautiful decisions and also its greatest twist.

The first part of the movie leads us to suspect alongside Xiaowei that Xie Nanzhi represents the classic “second family” waiting overseas. Instead it is revealed that Zheng Musheng actually died in 1960 and all the qiaopi letters, money and gifts received in the years after were actually from Xie Nanzhi who silently dedicated years of her own life to supporting Musheng’s family because she admired the man. This reveal transforms what could have been a cliched turn of events into a story about generosity, bonds and the human spirit.

In a film already filled with acts of unrecognized devotion, Nanzhi’s is the most remarkable.

The final reunion between the elderly Nanzhi and Shurou affected me even more than the reveal itself. Decades of misunderstanding are finally brought to light, but time has already claimed what it wanted. Nanzhi is shown to be in the advanced stages of dementia, remembering only parts of what she did for Shurou and Musheng. I couldn’t stop wondering what kind of friends these two women might have become had history been kinder to them, and they were able to meet earlier. However, the film refuses to indulge us in that fantasy. Some possibilities remain possibilities forever.

And yet, despite all the tragedies in the story, Dear You never left me feeling completely hopeless.

Our characters suffer great losses, but they continue to find meaning in the lives they actually have rather than the ones they imagined. Musheng inspires the children who he helped to educate leading to schools being named in his honor. He unwaveringly supports his family however he can. Shurou raises a family, holding on to belief and hope for decades. Nanzhi continues sending letters, money and gifts that aren’t on Musheng’s behalf because she feels inspired to do so. At the same time she raises an adopted child, inspired by Shurou. Their lives are nudged by fate into a shape different from what they longed for, but worthwhile all the same.

It reminded me of a thought I’ve encountered in different forms over the years: that longing itself can sometimes become one of life’s deepest experiences, perhaps even better than getting what you long for. None of these characters receive exactly what they want, yet there is fulfillment found in the life that they lived.

In many ways, the film, and perhaps life itself mirrors the olive served in its closing moments: bitter at first, then unexpectedly sweet.

To me, the film captures both the warmth of everyday life and the tragedies that sometimes sit beneath the surface, often unnoticed. The largely non-professional cast brings an unaffected authenticity that makes even the comic relief characters feel like people you’ve met before.

Dear You one of the few films I’ve watched that will continue to be in my thoughts for a long time; is my favourite film I’ve seen this year.

It taught me something about a chapter of history I only understood in patches before. It made me appreciate the generations who endured arduous circumstances so that their descendants could inherit better lives. And just like Shurou’s bittersweet olives the film suggests that life can be shaped as much by unrealized hopes as by its fulfilled ones. That the sweetness of life may arrive only decades later, perhaps only in the lives of the people who remember us.

And I feel that this is the closest the film comes to answering the questions it left me with. We don’t make peace with the lives we never got to have by pretending they wouldn’t have been as good as our imagination. We carry the alternate lives with us, acknowledge what was lost, and then keep living the life that remains. We honor the people we care about as best we can, do the work that is in front of us, and trust that the meaning of a life isn’t measured only by whether our deepest hopes came true. Maybe it is measured by the all the things - both small and large - that we do for those in our lives. In the end, maybe that’s enough.