Dear Ex, and the Grief That Could Only Speak as a Claim

A life insurance policy has one line that matters once the person it covers has died: the line with a name on it. On Song Zheng-yuan’s policy, that name had been his son’s. By the time he dies, it is Jay’s. Jay acts and directs in a small theatre, rides round town in his pyjamas, says he never knew anything about a policy, and is the man Zheng-yuan left his wife and son for. His wife, Liu San-lian, finds the change after the death, takes their teenage son, Cheng-xi, round to Jay’s flat, and demands the money back.

Dear Ex, the Taiwanese film that Mag Hsu and Hsu Chih-yen made in 2018, is usually described by that premise, a widow fighting her husband’s male lover over a payout, and the premise sounds like a comedy of bad manners. In stretches it is one. But the film notices something about the fight that its first scenes are built to hide. Three people have lost the same man: a wife who spent years as a good wife in a marriage that was not what she thought, a son who blames her, and a lover who has no public place to grieve at all. None of them is given anywhere to put the loss. And almost the only thing in the story that the law has a name for is the money.

So the grief goes there. This essay’s argument is that the quarrel over the policy is what mourning sounds like when it has nowhere else to stand. Under the shouting about a sum of money run three questions that nobody in the film seems able to ask in the open: did my years count, who was he, and who is allowed to mourn him. Of the three people asking them, the one the film is hardest on, and in the end most careful with, is the woman who holds every title a death leaves a family and feels, all the same, like the other woman.

The film is honest, too, that a grief with nowhere to go can do harm on its way. Before it ends, San-lian takes something in another man’s life that was his alone to tell, and uses it as a weapon. This essay names that plainly when it comes. It does not pretend that her grief excuses it, and it does not pretend that what she did settles who she is.

This essay discusses the whole film, including its ending and the reason the policy names Jay, which the film keeps back until late. A later section opens by saying where the ending begins, so that anyone who would rather meet it on screen can stop there and come back.

Dear Ex was directed by Mag Hsu, a well-known writer for Taiwanese television and film making her first narrative feature, and Hsu Chih-yen, who came to it from directing music videos; Mag Hsu and Lu Shih-yuan wrote the screenplay. Hsieh Ying-xuan plays San-lian, Roy Chiu plays Jay, Joseph Huang plays Cheng-xi, who tells the story, and Spark Chen plays Zheng-yuan, who is seen in flashbacks. The film had its premiere at the Far East Film Festival in Udine in April 2018, opened in Taiwan on 2 November that year, and reached Netflix worldwide on 1 February 2019, which is where it can be found in Japan.

The juries at home took it seriously. At the Taipei Film Awards in 2018, as Taiwan News reported, it won the prize for best narrative feature and both leading-acting prizes, for Roy Chiu and for Hsieh Ying-xuan. At the Golden Horse Awards that November it won three prizes: best leading actress for Hsieh, best original film song and best film editing. The following year it was chosen as Taiwan’s entry for the international feature award at the 2020 Academy Awards.

The film was not screened for this essay. What it says happens rests on the film’s published record and on the sources named at the end. Mag Hsu’s words come from an interview conducted in Mandarin and English and published in English translation. Lines of dialogue are paraphrased, never quoted as exact.

Start with what each of them has lost, because the film takes care to make the losses different.

San-lian spent years being a good wife and an anxious, exacting mother. Then, when he learned he was dying, her husband told her he was gay, left home, and spent the time he had left with Jay; and after his death she found that the insurance she had counted on for their son’s future would go to the man he had left them for. When she storms into Jay’s flat, she gives him a week to pay, or be exposed as the gay man who wrecked a family. At home she rules her son’s food, his marks and his future, and when she throws out his father’s things, he walks out.

Cheng-xi tells the story, and at first he is sure of it. His mother cares about nothing but money, and the man his father left them for must be trouble, probably on drugs. Sick of her rules and of the counselling she sends him to, he moves in with Jay, who does not want him, and trails him to rehearsals of the play Jay is directing.

Jay seems to care about nothing at all. Years ago he and Zheng-yuan fell in love in that theatre; Zheng-yuan left him to marry and have a family, and came back to him, dying, to spend the end of his life with him. Jay tells the boy that since he lost Zheng-yuan, every day has lasted ten thousand years.

Days before the film opened in Taiwan, the Taiwanese newsroom The Reporter set out the three of them as three people each wanting an answer. San-lian wants to know whether everything between her and her husband was false, whether he never loved her even a little. Cheng-xi wants to know why his father fell in love with another man and left home. Jay wants to bring back the memory of loving the man he lost. The description Netflix published when it took the film says that the boy, instead of having time to mourn, is caught in a feud, and that what holds his mother and Jay back is not the money but the weight of the loving memories each of them has of his father.

That last sentence is the distributor’s summary of the film, and it is right. What it leaves for the viewer to work out is why, if the fight is not about money, money is what they fight about.

The film’s way of telling all this was not its first choice, and Mag Hsu has been unusually frank about why.

The story began with a woman. Mag Hsu has said it came from a friend’s experience: a married woman who found out that her husband was having an affair with a man, and who, telling the story, was almost like San-lian, very dramatic. “I was stunned by the image of this woman,” Mag Hsu said, “and was intrigued at the same time, wanting to see the sorrow behind her façade.” The screenwriter Lu Shih-yuan, who had not been there when the friend told it, built the script from that starting point.

Then the first cut was shown to twenty viewers, and the director heard something she had not intended. They all reached the same conclusion, she recalled: “Liu San-Lien was like their mother, but she was really annoying.” Everyone found the character true to life, and everyone hated her. “What I’d been hoping,” Mag Hsu said, “was that the audience would see her pain.” Her answer was to give the story to the son. His narration says out loud what is maddening about his mother, so that the audience is in the same boat with him, “looking at this tiger mother and how scary she is!” “In the end,” she said, “it was her son who saved her, and made her likable.”

The drawings that run through the film came with that decision. Cheng-xi is seeing a counsellor, Mag Hsu explained, and drawing is one of the ways counsellors work with children; when she made him the narrator, the illustrations came in with him. So the first portrait the film offers of San-lian is her son’s, made by the person she tries hardest to control.

It is worth sitting with what that means. A grieving, furious woman was true to life on screen, and the audience could not bear her, until a boy was given the job of complaining about her first. By the director’s account the device worked. It is also a small confession about audiences. The woman the film began with could be seen only after someone else had been allowed to roll his eyes at her.

The festival that runs the Golden Horse Awards describes the film as telling a love story between two men and, alongside it, turning its attention to the women sacrificed in Taiwan’s own version of the marriage in form only, under the conservative attitudes of an earlier time. San-lian is one of those women. Her son is the first to describe her, and on this reading the rest of the film is spent revising his portrait.

It would be easy to read San-lian as the film’s obstacle, the angry widow standing between a grieving man and his money. The film knows that reading, since it was the first cut’s problem, and it gives her side enough weight to unsettle it.

Consider what she was owed, and when she got it. For years she kept her side of a marriage: the home, the boy, the meals, the marks, the plans. She was not told what the arrangement rested on. She learned it only when her husband knew he was dying, and then she lost him twice, once when he left home for Jay and once when he died. Whatever time she had to argue with him, to ask him why, or to be angry at him while he could still hear it, was the time he had left, and he spent it with Jay.

Be clear about what wronged her. It was not that her husband was gay. It was being kept outside the truth of her own marriage for years, and being let in only when there was nothing left to do with what she learned.

Anger at someone who has died has nowhere to go. It lands on the living, and on whoever stood nearest the dead. In this story that is Jay. San-lian is not wrong that something was done to her. What she cannot do is put it to the one person who could have answered for it, and the film is careful not to make him a villain either. The flashbacks show a young man who loved Jay and left him to marry and have a family; on this reading, he paid for that for the rest of his life, and made everyone who loved him pay for it too.

The film’s sharpest turn of the knife is in its title. In Chinese it asks a question: who fell in love with him first? By the order of love, the answer is Jay, who loved him before the marriage did. And by that order, the wife becomes the latecomer in her own marriage, the one who arrived second. San-lian holds every title a death leaves a family. She is the widow, the mother of his son, the one the law recognises. She is left feeling like the unloved other woman. It is the cruellest arithmetic in the story, and the film lets her feel all of it.

This Library’s essay “The State of Affairs and How to Ask Why Without Calling Betrayal Harmless” held two sentences together without letting either thin the other: betrayal can have a history, and the betrayed person did not consent to being taught through it. Dear Ex asks its audience for the first sentence, and rightly. The hidden life Zheng-yuan led has a history, and the flashbacks give it with great tenderness. But San-lian is owed the second. She did not agree to be the place where that history was paid for, and a reading that hurries past her to the love story has missed half of what the film is about.

Now look at the policy again, because it is doing more than it seems to.

A life insurance policy is a small legal instrument. It names a person and a sum, and once the insured person has died, it can be claimed. It cannot record why a name was put there, what the person named meant to the one who named him, or who else was owed something. For San-lian, the money was the last piece of her marriage that pointed forward: it had been meant for her son. For Jay, the line on the policy is where a legal document writes his name beside Zheng-yuan’s. Within the story, almost nothing else that passed between those two men has any legal form.

That fact has a date outside the film. The law that allows two people of the same sex in Taiwan to form what it calls a permanent union, intimate and exclusive, for the purpose of living a common life came into force on 24 May 2019, some seven months after Dear Ex opened there. The film does not need the statute to make its point, and this essay does not lay it over the story. It is enough to notice that the line on which the law does write Jay’s name is a line Zheng-yuan filled in himself.

This Library’s essay “Towako Omameda and Her Three Ex-Husbands, and an Alone That Keeps Its People” found the loss that leaves a woman most alone in a friend with no legal standing, no word for what she was, and no line on any form. Jay is the opposite case, and the film shows why it is no comfort. He has, in effect, one line on one form, and it is the line everyone is fighting over.

Put the three griefs beside that line and the fight explains itself. San-lian cannot file a claim for her years. Jay cannot file one for the years he was left behind. Cheng-xi, whose future the money was meant for, cannot file a claim for a father. A form takes a name and a sum, so a sum is what they argue over. A claim is the one kind of grief that a form will accept, and the film’s comedy, the shouting in doorways, the threats, the boy’s exasperated narration, is the sound of three people trying to say something enormous in the only grammar the situation has given them.

Jay is the hardest person in the film to see, because he has arranged not to be seen.

He rides round town in his pyjamas. He seems careless about everything, and about the policy most of all. He refuses to give the money back. When the boy moves in uninvited, Jay puts up with him the way one puts up with weather. It takes Cheng-xi, trailing him to rehearsals and living in his flat, to see what the manner is for. The man is not carefree. He is grieving, and he has nowhere to do it.

Consider where a man in Jay’s position could have mourned. Not beside the family, to whom he is the man the husband left them for. Not with his own mother, who does not know that he is gay. Not in any record that would let a stranger understand what he had lost. The flashbacks give what he cannot say to anyone: two young men falling in love in a theatre, the leaving, the years, and a dying man coming back to the person he loved first. Jay’s one sentence about it, that every day since has lasted ten thousand years, may be the most exact description of grief in the film, and he says it to a teenager who has moved in on him.

What he does instead is make a play. The festival’s note on the film says that Jay is determined to commemorate the man he loved in his own way, and on this reading his own way is the stage. Mag Hsu has said that the play is a piece she once wrote and directed herself for the theatre, and that in the script Jay was stuck in endless rehearsals; she changed it so that he puts the play together and finally performs it. “He’s like a guy who sees his work falling apart, on the verge of collapse,” she said, “but chooses to hold onto it until the last minute.” A grief that has no public place builds one. That is what the opening night will turn out to be.

Andrew Lapin, reviewing Dear Ex for NPR, set it beside The Cakemaker, an Israeli film of the year before that also links its people through a closeted family man who has just died, and found the Israeli film the subtler of the two. The comparison is useful for another reason. In The Cakemaker a German baker, whose married lover has died in an accident, goes to Jerusalem and, without telling the widow who he is, takes a job in the kitchen of her café. The lover’s grief has to borrow a place, and it borrows hers, in silence. In Dear Ex it is the widow who comes to the lover’s door, saying exactly who she is, at volume. Two films about the same three people, entered from opposite doors. In both, the lover has nowhere of his own to mourn.

From the start, San-lian’s weapon is exposure. A week to pay, or the world will hear about the gay man who wrecked a family. Later she finds a sharper edge. Jay’s mother does not know her son is gay. San-lian threatens to tell her unless he pays, and in the end she tells her anyway.

Say plainly what that is. It is outing: making a man’s sexuality known to his mother against his will. First it was held over him, with a price on her silence; then it was done. It is a serious harm. It takes from Jay the one decision that was his alone, whether, when and how his mother would hear it, and from whom, and it hands that decision to someone who was using it as leverage. What does the damage is not the fact that is told. Being gay is not the wound here. The taking is.

Nothing in this essay’s account of San-lian’s side unsays that paragraph. Nothing in that paragraph is a verdict on who she is.

Her side deserves to be heard in full, because the film hears it. She had spent years outside a man’s secret. Now she finds another secret, and another woman outside it, a mother who does not know that her son is gay. It is not hard to see why that secret looks to her like a debt she can collect. A hidden life had cost her a marriage’s worth of years. Here was the same hidden life, with another man inside it, and the money was going to him.

This Library’s essay “Made in Heaven, and Everything She Had to Bargain For” kept three words apart: what one is owed, what one can trade, and what can only be given. San-lian is owed something, and she is right about that; she was owed the truth about her own marriage, years before she got it. But the person who owed it to her is dead, and the only thing she can find to trade is another man’s privacy, which was never hers to sell. That is the mechanism the film shows, and it is worth being exact about it. Grief that cannot reach the person who caused it goes looking for someone who can be made to pay, and the nearest such person may well be the only other one who lost the same thing.

This is the cruel part, and it deserves anger, aimed where it belongs: at whatever made a life have to be hidden, not at either of the two people the hiding cost. The price San-lian sets on Jay is the price the hidden life set on her. She makes the one person who paid it alongside her pay it again.

From here, this essay describes how the film ends, and why the policy names Jay.

A gang of men attacks Jay, and he is badly hurt. San-lian and Cheng-xi get him to hospital, and there the truth comes out. When Zheng-yuan was ill, there was an operation that might have saved him, and Jay borrowed the money for it from loan sharks. Zheng-yuan put Jay’s name on the policy to protect him from that debt.

Everything San-lian had read in that line changes. She had taken it as a verdict: proof, in writing, that the man she married had loved someone else more, so much more that he took their son’s future and gave it away. It was not a verdict. It was an arrangement about a debt, and the debt had been taken on to try to keep her son’s father alive. The money was never a measure of who was loved. It was the cost of a hope, being met by the man the hope had been for.

What the explanation does not obviously answer is the question The Reporter put first among hers: whether everything between her and her husband was false. The truth that comes out at the hospital is a truth about the money. On this reading it answers a different question from the one she has been asking all along, and what it tells her about her own years, this essay cannot say.

Despite his injury, Jay goes back to the theatre for the opening night, and San-lian and Cheng-xi watch the play from the audience.

If the play is the place Jay built for a grief that had none, then the widow has taken a seat in it. Not on the stage: in the audience, watching another person mourn the man she married. It may be the quietest generosity in the film, and because it costs her nothing that can be counted, it is easy to miss.

Afterwards Jay’s mother comes to him with flowers, and they hold each other in tears.

Set that embrace beside what came before it, and keep the two apart. The embrace belongs to his mother. Nothing San-lian did could have made her come. The essay on Made in Heaven followed a gay son whose dying mother would not send for him, and found the edge of what even a right can reach: a court can strike down a law, but it cannot make a mother send for her son. The same holds, turned round, for a wrong. An outing cannot put flowers in a mother’s hands. Whatever brought Jay’s mother to the theatre, it was hers. That is exactly why the outing can take no credit for the flowers, and why a viewer who comes away thinking it all worked out may have drawn the wrong lesson from the right ending.

San-lian lets Jay keep the money, and Cheng-xi goes home with his mother.

What does a family owe the person a husband truly loved? The film’s answer, on this reading, is modest and exact. Not love. Not even understanding, all at once. It owes him, first, an end to making his grief the price of its own. And after that, perhaps, a seat in the audience: the willingness to sit and watch another person mourn the same man, without needing the mourning to be about oneself.

In Japan the film is on Netflix under a title that turns the Chinese question into a statement. The original asks who fell in love with him first. The Japanese title names a person: the one who loved first. And the Japanese phrase, as this essay reads its grammar, does not say who did the loving; it can be read as the person who loved first, or as the person who was loved first. Either way, the title answers with someone. The film, on this reading, ends up wiser than either of its titles. By the end, the question of who came first has stopped mattering. What matters is whether there is room for more than one grief at the same time.

The film also stands in a line. A quarter of a century earlier, Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, a Taiwanese and American film that won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1993, followed a gay Taiwanese man in New York who marries an artist from mainland China in need of a green card, in the hope of placating his parents. She knows the arrangement; it is the parents who are kept outside it. Dear Ex turns to a woman who was not let in: the wife who was not told until the end, the kind of woman the Golden Horse festival’s note calls sacrificed.

In Japan, the act San-lian commits has a name borrowed from English, outing, written in katakana, and at least one official text that treats it as a harm. The guideline on power harassment at work that the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare issued in January 2020, and amended in 2026, gives, among its examples of an infringement of the individual, disclosing a worker’s sexual orientation or gender identity, medical history or fertility treatment to other workers without the worker’s consent. That guideline is about workplaces in Japan; the film is about a family in Taiwan; this essay applies the one to the other in no way at all. What the sentence shows is only where an official text puts the harm. Not in the fact disclosed, but in the disclosing, without consent.

A reader in Japan does not need to have lived San-lian’s marriage to recognise the shape of her position: someone who kept her side of an arrangement whose terms were set without her, and found out what they were only when it was too late to renegotiate. Nor does she need to have been outed to understand what it would mean to have the timing of the most private thing in her life taken out of her hands. The film asks her to hold both. None of this sets Taiwan beside Japan as better or worse, and neither the film nor this essay is a portrait of Taiwanese families, or of Japanese ones.

There are at least four ways this reading could be wrong, and a fifth that belongs to the one making it.

First, the ending may be more conditional than this essay has allowed. The policy named Jay. Yet the film settles the quarrel only after he has been shown to be selfless, once the debt for the operation comes out, and it frames the end as the wife letting him keep the money. A reader could fairly say that the film makes a gay man’s claim to what his partner left him wait on two things: proof of his sacrifice, and the widow’s consent. This essay has read that ending as generosity. It may be generosity with conditions.

Second, the frame. By Mag Hsu’s own account, the son’s narration was brought in so that audiences would stop hating his mother, by letting him complain about her first. This essay has argued that the film then revises his portrait. A reader may feel instead that the first portrait stays on screen longer and louder than the revision, and that a woman made likeable by being laughed at first has been rescued at a price. That is a serious objection, and the director’s candour supports it as much as it supports this essay.

Third, the embrace. The film follows the worst thing San-lian does with the best thing that happens to Jay. Whatever the film intends, a viewer may come away thinking the outing worked out. This essay has said plainly that it did not, and that the flowers belong to his mother. The film itself may say it less plainly.

Fourth, the tone. NPR’s reviewer found narrative hiccups and tonal missteps in it, and thought it might pale beside The Cakemaker. A comedy built around a death, an outing and a beating may not be able to hold all three, and an essay that reads the film at its most serious may be asking it to carry more weight than it can.

Fifth, and aimed at the writer: this essay is written in Japan, about a film in Mandarin, and it leans on its director’s words and its critics’. Where it goes beyond them, it is interpretation, and should be read as that.

Two things, kept apart.

First: when a grief has no public place, it may move into whatever the law has a name for. A policy, a form, a name on a deed, an account. A fight over money after a death can be grief in the only grammar it has been given. That does not make every such fight innocent, and it does not make the money unimportant; San-lian’s son did need a future. But before deciding what a quarrel at a death is about, it may be worth asking what the money is standing in for.

Second: a document left behind is easily read as a verdict on love. San-lian read a beneficiary line as the last word on her marriage, and it was an arrangement about a debt. Papers are seldom where the dead say whom they loved. They are where the living find out what was arranged.

If you found out late that the marriage you kept was not the marriage you were in, you may be grieving twice: for the person, and for the years as you understood them. You were owed the truth, and you were owed it long before you got it. The second grief has no ceremony and no form to file, and it is no less a grief for that. It is allowed to be angry. What the film suggests, and only suggests, is that the anger is yours, to carry and to put down when you choose; and that anger like this seldom reaches the one who caused it. It tends to land on someone else who loved the same person, and who is very often grieving too.

This is a reading of a film. It is not legal advice about insurance, inheritance, marriage or employment, in Taiwan, in Japan or anywhere else, and it diagnoses no one, the characters included.

It rests on the film’s published record and on the following, read where they were published: the notes on the film from the festival that runs the Golden Horse Awards; the announcement Netflix made when it took the film; Taiwan News’s report of the film’s selection for the Academy Awards, which also gives its prizes at the Taipei Film Awards; Christopher Brown’s interview with Mag Hsu in Bright Lights Film Journal, published in 2019 in English translation; The Reporter’s 2018 article on the film and its two directors; and Andrew Lapin’s review for NPR. Where a scene is described as a source describes it, it is that source’s account.

The law and the guideline appear as their texts state them: Taiwan’s act implementing Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748, which came into force on 24 May 2019, and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s guideline on power harassment at work, issued in January 2020 and amended in 2026. Neither is applied to anyone in the film.

No maker, performer, critic, festival or platform named here has any connection with this publication, and none has endorsed it.

Is there a quarrel in your life, over money, a home or a form, that is really about something you were never allowed to say?

Whose grief have you treated as having no standing, only because it came without a title?

If a paper someone left behind read like a verdict on you, what else might it have been arranging?

Whose secret have you held that was never yours to spend?