Before Ekin Cheng was Ekin, he was Dior — a name his little sister invented because she couldn't quite pronounce his real one. Before he was a Cantopop star, he was a martial arts trainee who quit because he didn't like getting hit. And before he was Chan Ho-nam, the ponytailed triad leader who defined an entire decade of Hong Kong cool, he was a lanky teenager at the TVB acting school who nobody thought would make it. Then the mid-1990s happened, a director called Andrew Lau shoved a leather jacket at him, and Cantonese cinema found its coolest kid.
This is Ekin Cheng Yee-Kin (鄭伊健) — born 4 October 1967, still standing at 58 with the exact same haircut, still married to the exact same woman, and still, somehow, the coolest guy in every room.
The Cantonese kid who almost wasn't
Ekin grew up in Hong Kong in a modest family. His nickname "Dior" came from the way his younger sister mispronounced his childhood name — long before the French fashion house ever crossed his mind. He wanted to act. He enrolled in TVB's martial arts training school first, hoping to become one of the new generation of action men that Hong Kong cinema was minting by the truckload. He hated it. Getting kicked, thrown, and choreographed all day was, in his own words later, not what he signed up for. He switched to TVB's acting school instead, and never looked back.
Through the early 1990s he took TV drama roles and low-budget film parts, using the name "Dior Cheng" on the credits. He was tall, gently handsome, and — crucially — grew his hair long at a time when every other Hong Kong male star was still doing the neat suit-and-side-parting thing. The look was, at first, a mild rebellion. Very quickly, it became a franchise.
If you like your streetwear with that mid-'90s Central-at-night energy, our 廣東仔 CANTONESE GUY oversized tee is cut for exactly that generation of confident, quietly cool Cantonese guys.
1996: the year Ekin became Chan Ho-nam
In January 1996, director Andrew Lau released the first Young and Dangerous (古惑仔) film, based on the wildly popular Hong Kong comic series by Ngau Lo. It followed a young Hongkonger named Chan Ho-nam rising through the ranks of a Triad society, alongside his brothers. The role was going to be Ekin's — long hair, leather jacket, easy grin.
The film was cheap, fast, and stylish. It cost a fraction of what other Hong Kong action films cost. It made a fortune. By the end of 1996, Andrew Lau had shot and released Young and Dangerous, Young and Dangerous 2, and Young and Dangerous 3, all in the same year, all starring the same cast. The trilogy printed money. By 1997, Ekin's face was on every schoolbag, poster and pirated VCD in Southeast Asia.
🎬 The name change nobody noticed
Sometime between his TV drama phase and the launch of Young and Dangerous, Dior Cheng became Ekin Cheng. The story goes that his English name Dior was starting to feel too fashion-brand-adjacent as his profile exploded. He picked Ekin — a made-up, easy-to-say syllable — and just… quietly rolled it out. Half of Asia figured they had a new star. Really, they just had the same guy under a new sign.
🎤 The theme song that outlived the films
Ekin's biggest music hit came directly out of the Young and Dangerous universe. "友情歲月" (Age of Friendship / Years of Friendship), the theme song of the first film, became one of the most-covered Cantopop songs of the 1990s. Two decades later, Hong Kongers still sing it at karaoke — usually with an arm around a friend, badly, and with total sincerity.
Cantopop's coolest recorder
Riding the film wave, Ekin signed with BMG and released a string of Cantopop albums through the late '90s and early 2000s. His voice was never technically brilliant — he was no Jacky Cheung — but he had something almost more valuable in that era: a face and a persona that fit the songs. The look drove the music, and the music drove the box office. It was a virtuous, very '90s Hong Kong loop.
He worked with major producers, released fan-favourites like "極速" and "友情歲月," and became a Four Little Heavenly Kings (四大天王) nominee — the emerging generation of male Cantopop stars trying to succeed Andy Lau, Jacky Cheung, Leon Lai and Aaron Kwok. The Fourth Heavenly King story we told earlier is the older-generation version of this exact moment.
💍 A wedding on the other side of the sea
Ekin dated fellow Hong Kong actress Yoyo Mung Ka-wai for seven years before they married on 28 January 2013 — not in Hong Kong, but at a two-Michelin-star restaurant called Aimee Vibert in Tokyo. Only about 40 family members were there. They chose Japan because it was the destination of their first holiday together. There was no press circus. In an industry that runs on spectacle, they got married the way they lived — quietly, together, and on their own terms.
🖤 The haircut that refused to die
Look at any photo of Ekin from 1996. Now look at one from 2016. Now 2026. The hair, more or less, is exactly the same — long, layered, flopping into his eyes. He has been asked, more than once, why he never changed it. His answer, essentially: it's what worked. In an industry that thrashes stars through image resets every three years, sticking with the exact same look for three decades is either laziness or a masterclass. In Ekin's case, it's a masterclass.
A Cantonese word Chan Ho-nam gave every schoolboy
The Young and Dangerous films didn't just print money — they poured slang into an entire generation of Hong Kong teenagers. One term above all became inseparable from Ekin's face:
古惑仔
gu2 waak6 zai2 — Jyutping romanisation
Meaning: A young hustler / street-smart triad kid.
Explanation: Literally something like "clever wily kid." It existed before the films but the Ekin franchise fossilised it into pop-culture Cantonese. Post-1996, if you called someone a 古惑仔, everyone knew exactly what image you were reaching for — the long hair, the leather jacket, the swagger.
If you want a piece that carries that exact swaggery, ready-to-argue Cantonese kid energy, the 把炮 Capable oversized tee is the closest we get to a Chan Ho-nam graphic on cotton.
Why Ekin Cheng still matters to the Cantonese diaspora
For anyone who grew up Cantonese in the 1990s — in Hong Kong, in Vancouver, in London Chinatown, in a Guangzhou apartment block, in a suburban Sydney bedroom with a VCD player — Ekin Cheng is a very specific kind of memory. He's the older brother we didn't have. The neighbour who came home from Hong Kong with the leather jacket. The face on the poster inside our friend's locker. He and the Young and Dangerous films gave the '90s Cantonese kid a hero who looked like them, spoke like them, and wasn't apologising for any of it.
In 2026, the culture he helped shape has completed the loop. Streetwear is now the way global Cantonese youth signal exactly the kind of pride Chan Ho-nam once wore as a costume. The long hair, the graphic tee, the confident refusal to code-switch — Ekin was the prototype.
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