Dear You review

Dear You is a Chinese-language movie that I thought was really lovely. It starts with a Chinese guy in his 30s who's basically kind of a loser. He's always in debt, always looking for money, and he comes up with this plan to go to Thailand and find the grandfather who disappeared from the family decades earlier. He thinks there may be money there, so he's not exactly beginning this journey for some deep emotional reason. He's trying to solve his own problems.

The family's understanding is that his grandfather left China for Thailand to make money and support the family from there, but he never actually came home. His wife was left in China raising their children without him, and that absence became part of the history of the family. But the family continued. She raised the children, the children grew up and had children of their own, and life went on. By the time the grandson goes looking for him, he's dealing with something that happened generations earlier but is still sitting there in the middle of this family's story.

So he goes to Thailand for fairly selfish reasons and starts trying to figure out what actually happened to his grandfather. From there, the movie starts bringing together the family history in China and the relationships his grandfather had in Thailand. I'm not going to get too far into what he discovers because those discoveries are really the movie, and I think you're better off learning all of that along with him.

What interested me most was the diaspora aspect of this. There's a particular kind of family experience here where somebody leaves home, goes to another country to make money and sends resources back to people he may not see again for years, or possibly ever. The person is physically gone, but the family relationship continues across countries. China obviously has a lot of that history, but so do India, Italy and plenty of other places where large numbers of people left home while maintaining connections with the families and communities they left behind.

I was watching that part of the movie from the outside because it isn't really part of my own family experience. I'm Black, African-American, and whatever particular place in Africa my ancestors originally came from, those direct family ties were severed a very long time ago. We don't have an old country where I have relatives I can go find or some other branch of the family that's been living there while my branch has been living here. So the idea of having generations of one family living in different countries, sending money and letters back and forth and still understanding themselves as connected to one another isn't something I have any personal experience with.

But I found it fascinating, and I think that's probably part of why I liked the movie as much as I did. You're watching what one man's decision to leave home meant not just for him, but for his wife, his children, his grandchildren and people living in another country decades later. I think if you come from a family where immigration and that kind of diaspora relationship are part of your own history, some of this is probably going to hit you even harder because you'll recognize things in these relationships that I was seeing from the outside.

Even without that personal connection, I thought Dear You was charming, beautifully shot and really well done. There's a warmth to the whole thing that I really enjoyed, even as it gets into some complicated family history. It's just a lovely movie, and if you get the opportunity to see it, I recommend it.