(This is reproduced from the posting I made on my Facebook Page on 16th July 2026.)

I watched a small, quiet film called Dear You, and it undid me in the gentlest way. You have probably have seen the movie too, and cried a bucket. Told mostly in Teochew, it follows a young man travelling to Thailand to find the grandfather he never knew – guided only by qiaopi, the old overseas Chinese letters that once carried both news and money across the seas, back to families who were waiting.

I didn’t expect it to feel so personal. But my late parents, Hii Heng Chiong and Tang Chai Ding, were first-generation migrants from Fuzhou, in Fujian province. And watching those letters unfold on screen, I was suddenly a small child again, watching my father sit down to write. He wrote to relatives back in China, and whatever spare cash he could gather, he sent – even while raising a big family of his own on so little.

A month or two before Ching Ming festival, that money would go home with quiet instructions: clean his parents’ tombs, tend to his relatives, the ones he could no longer reach except through paper and ink. And I remember I used to wait at the jetty at Engkilo Village for him to return from a day’s hard labour in Sibu town each evening, hoping for some snacks or treats that he could ill afford.

China now looks nothing like it did then. So much has changed. But for those of us who lived through those hard years, we still carry the memory of what our parents held onto – a devotion to an ancestral homeland and a family they could only touch through a letter and a little money, sent faithfully, again and again.

I think that’s what stayed with me the most. The roots we can’t see are often the ones that hold the tightest.