How Lan Hongchun’s Teochew Film ‘Dear You’ Turned a Forgotten Postal Tradition Into China’s Unlikely Hit: ‘Dialect Is Never Going to Be a Liability as Long as You Have Great Ideas’

Four people. One letter. An ocean between them. To send a letter home from Bangkok in the 1950s, an overseas Chinese laborer needed four people: himself, a scribe to put his words on paper, a reader to decode it at the destination and the person waiting to hear it read aloud. Lan Hongchun built a…