2026-05-26
Why Xie Nanzhi Matters
Xie Nanzhi is moving not because the film gives her a complete ending, but because she protects someone else’s emotional world for years. She is not a side note; she is the hidden center of Dear You.
She is not only a plot reveal
Many viewers remember Xie Nanzhi through the discovery that reshapes the story: the letters that seemed to belong to one family also carry the life of another woman. It would be easy to treat her as a plot twist, but Dear You gives her more weight than that.
If Xie Nanzhi were only a device, the film would end once the secret was known. Instead, viewers are invited to reconsider her years of writing, silence, restraint, and care. She does not exist to surprise the audience. She exists to make the film’s idea of loyalty emotionally possible.
Her presence shifts the film from a search for a missing grandfather into a story about a woman who helps another woman’s family survive emotionally, while accepting that her own role may never be fully seen.
Kindness is a long decision
In interviews, Li Sitong has connected Xie Nanzhi with regret, courage, and kindness. Those words can sound soft until they are placed back inside the film. Nanzhi’s kindness is not passivity. It is the repeated choice not to turn her pain into harm.
Each letter asks her to occupy a difficult position. She writes words that will comfort another woman, while knowing that the comfort also keeps her outside the family world she is helping preserve. That is not a single sacrifice; it is a burden renewed again and again.
This is why the character feels real. She is not heroic in a loud way. She is heroic in the exhausting way ordinary people sometimes are: by continuing to do the right thing when nobody is there to reward it.
Her relationship with Shurou is not just a triangle
Reading Xie Nanzhi only through a romantic triangle makes the film smaller. The more powerful relationship is between Nanzhi and Ye Shurou, two women who do not fully meet in truth but whose lives become deeply entangled through letters.
Nanzhi’s writing protects Shurou’s belief in a family connection. Shurou’s preservation of the letters also preserves Nanzhi’s hidden existence. They are not simple rivals. They are connected by misunderstanding, care, absence, and a form of emotional support that neither can name directly.
That is why the film’s women-centered reading matters. It does not need to rename the entire story. It simply notices who bears the consequences of migration, silence, and family duty.
Regret is not failure
Chinese media discussions around Li Sitong’s performance have framed Xie Nanzhi through the idea of regret. That is a useful lens because her regret is not just an unhappy ending. It is the trace of a real feeling that could not become possession, recognition, or public memory.
The film does not let her prove herself through accusation. Instead, it lets the audience understand her late. That delayed understanding is painful because it resembles many family stories: the deepest labor is not always recorded when it happens.
Xie Nanzhi is therefore not a supporting character in the emotional sense. She is the person who turns Dear You from a family mystery into a story about protecting love even when love cannot return in the form one hoped for.