The Money Came Home in a Letter
Leaving is a certain loss. We move when staying becomes the larger one.
Dear You is the Teochew film playing in cinemas in Singapore now. A grandmother in Chaoshan waits half her life for letters from her husband, who left for Thailand in 1948. Money comes folded inside them. It feeds the family while she raises their children alone.
Behind the film stands a larger story. Roughly twenty million Chinese went down to Nanyang between 1840 and 1940. They left poverty and war. They sent wages home through couriers known as water guests, in letters called qiaopi.
On the surface it is a love story. Underneath is a hard decision about money. A man gives up everything he knows today, the food, the language, the safety of a familiar place, for a gain that is years away and never promised. Most people in his position never go.
Why most people stay
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the psychologists who built prospect theory, found that we do not weigh gains and losses evenly. A loss is felt about twice as hard as a gain of the same size. Leaving home is built mostly of losses, and they arrive the moment the boat pulls away. The gain is distant and unsure. People protect what they have while they still can. So the man stays in the village.
This is why a move that pays can sit untaken for years. Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, an economist at Yale, showed it in rural Bangladesh in the hungry months before harvest. He offered poor families about eight dollars and fifty cents to send one member to the city to look for work. The small sum moved twenty-two percent of them to send a migrant. Families given only information, and no money, barely moved. Knowing the city had work was not enough. What held them back was the cost and the risk of the first step.
When staying becomes the loss
So what changes the mind. Not a brighter future. A darker present.
Kahneman and Tversky also found that risk looks different from inside a loss. A person protecting a comfortable position stays careful. A person already facing a sure loss turns bold, because being careful no longer protects anything. The choice is no longer safety against risk. It is one loss against another, and only one of them has a way out.
That is why the boats left. The Nanyang migrants did not leave because Nanyang called. They left because home had stopped being safe. Famine and war had already made the village a certain loss. Once staying was the loss, the dangerous crossing became the smaller risk.
The same shift, closer to home
Korea has a word for the modern version. Gireogi appa, the wild goose father. He stays in Seoul and works while his wife and children live abroad for the children’s schooling, and he flies over once or twice a year, like a migrating goose. The family splits in half. The cost is paid every day, in an empty flat on one side and an absent father on the other.
They accept it for the reason the migrant boarded the boat. Keeping everyone home has come to feel like the loss. A childhood spent only inside Korea’s exam system, without the English that opens doors later, reads to these parents as a future surrendered. Against a loss that certain, the broken household becomes the bet worth making.
The Filipino version sends a wire instead of a letter. In 2025 overseas Filipinos sent home a record thirty-five billion dollars, more than seven percent of GDP, and Singapore was the second largest source.
What it costs to sit still
A saver holds cash for years while prices climb. He is not lazy and not careless. He is doing what the migrant’s neighbours did. He protects the safe thing, because moving carries a visible risk and staying shows no loss on the statement.
He moves for the same reason everyone in this story moved. Not when someone shows him the upside. When sitting still begins to cost him something he can finally see. When inflation turns the safe pile into the shrinking one, cash starts to feel like the certain loss, and the risk he avoided for years starts to look like the smaller danger.
The man from Chaoshan did not leave because the future was bright. He left because staying had become the bigger loss. The rest of us are slower to see that moment, the day the safe choice turns into the expensive one. He saw it. He got on the boat, and for years the only thing that came back was a letter with money folded inside. That is why the money came home.
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Please consult a qualified professional before making investment decisions.