Zun: From 'Yellow-Haired Pig' to Two Million-Subscriber Channels, the Lonely Weight of a 27-Year-Old 'Clean Stream'

30-second overview:
Chu Yu-en, nicknamed “Zun,” was born in Kaohsiung on November 16, 1998. On January 14, 2018, at age 19, he pushed his main channel, “人生肥宅x尊” (Life Otaku x Zun), past one million subscribers, becoming Taiwan’s youngest million-subscriber YouTuber at the time. Eight years later, he is 27; his second channel, “人生魯宅x尊” (Life Loser-Otaku x Zun), also passed one million subscribers at the end of 2024, completing a “double million” milestone. His brother Xiao Yu, then in prison, sent him a joss-paper dragon boat from the correctional facility in congratulations. Yet Zun has publicly admitted that “the home I live in is rented, and the car I drive is a ten-year-old used car,” and that he “probably does not count as what people call a winner in life.” This article is about how the fan-given gift of the label “clean stream,” after the 2023 Top War sponsored-content debacle and the 2021 Deepfake case involving his older brother, became a threefold weight carried by a 27-year-old young man.

From “Yellow-Haired Pig” to Japanese-Style Rapid Editing: Imitation as the Entry Ticket

In 2012, a junior high school student in Kaohsiung sat in his room and, under the nickname “Yellow-Haired Pig,” recorded Minecraft gameplay commentary and uploaded it to YouTube¹. He also occasionally used another, even more ungainly nickname: “Chu Mao-mao.” At the time, his name was Chu Yu-en. He was 14, and like boys his age across Taiwan, he watched videos by A-Shen (chaoneat) and Gu Amo.

Years later, in a video on his second channel titled “Digging Up My Dark-History Videos from Five Years Ago,” Zun mocked his early years as having “started out by plagiarizing A-Shen”[^2]: from tone and editing rhythm to the way he approached topics, he was imitating the top gaming streamers in Taiwan’s YouTube scene at the time. He later locked those old videos, and when filming his own videos he would often joke about this prehistoric period.

The real turning point came when he began following Japan’s YouTube scene, especially Hajime-shachō (はじめしゃちょー). He brought into Taiwan the rapid jump cuts, exaggerated typographic effects, and experimental topics common in Japanese videos. At the time, Taiwan’s YouTube field was still dominated by long-form gameplay commentary, and this sense of rhythm was like replacing an entire system of visual language. The channel name “人生肥宅x尊” also took shape during this period. It evolved from “Yellow-Haired Pig” through several changes and eventually became the symbol of a generation. “肥宅” (fei-zhai, literally “fat otaku,” a self-deprecating internet label for a socially withdrawn nerd) still carried a strong self-mocking tone in 2014-2015; on PTT’s CChat board, users wore the two characters almost like a badge. By attaching it to his own ID, Zun was effectively telling viewers: “I am not trying to act like a sunny boy. I am the otaku recording _Minecraft in his room.” That refusal to pretend was an early foreshadowing of why the “clean stream” label would later stick to him.

📝 Curator’s note: Imitation is the entry ticket to creation, but whether one can grow something of one’s own after imitation is a separate matter. The key to Zun is not “whom he imitated,” but how he localized a Japanese visual language into an otaku culture Taiwanese teenagers could understand.

On January 14, 2018, his main channel passed one million subscribers². Zun was 19 at the time. He was the tenth Taiwanese creator to reach one million subscribers³, and the media labeled him the “youngest”: while classmates his age were still in their first year of university, he was already financially free. Challenges involving the spiciest lollipops, tests of urban legends, and all kinds of absurd experiments looked ridiculous on the surface, but they precisely captured the internet generation’s desire for the “meaning of meaninglessness.” He graduated from National Lo-Tung Commercial Vocational High School, later entered the continuing bachelor’s program in Public Administration and Policy at National Taipei University, subsequently suspended his studies, and settled in Taipei⁴.

“The Only Clean Stream in the YT World”: A Gift Conferred by Fans

Before discussing “clean stream,” one has to unpack the channel name “人生肥宅x尊” once. “肥宅” was a badge on PTT’s C_Chat board in the mid-2010s; putting “人生” (life) in front of it turned otaku-ness into a life posture rather than a mockery of appearance; the “尊” in “x尊” was both a name and a kind of cold smile. When these three terms were joined together, Taiwan’s YouTube scene did not yet have the term “persona management,” and creators’ ways of positioning themselves were still quite plain. The junior and senior high school students of that generation, whose first act after turning on the computer was to watch Zun “challenge the spiciest lollipop,” have now largely entered society. The videos they remember are only a small part of it. More important was a generational tacit understanding defined by the channel name: “My life is very otaku, and I do not plan to explain it.”

The term “clean stream” did not appear out of nowhere in Taiwan’s YouTube scene. The person first crowned “the only clean stream in YT” was actually Bald Brother Chen Chun-chieh: he went viral in 2017 for “Brother, no; m̄-thang o” (a Taiwanese Hokkien phrase meaning “don’t do that”), insisted on not accepting donations, and when he died in 2019, the entire PTT Gossiping board collectively mourned him⁵. The prototype of the label was “not relying on sex, shock, or sensationalism; not grabbing quick money; making content steadily.”

After Chen Chun-chieh’s death, the term gradually shifted onto Zun. On the day in September 2018 when HouseFun News reported on “Taiwan’s youngest million-subscriber YT creator,” comments on PTT’s Gossiping board already included the phrase “Zun is the only clean stream in YT”⁶. In 2022, when SET News reported on whether “Sheng-Huo-Yu-Zun” had fallen from grace, it explicitly wrote that “Dcard users all say Zun is the clean stream of the YouTuber world”⁷.

During that period, incident after incident erupted in Taiwan’s YouTube scene: Gu Amo was sued by multiple film distributors in 2017 for copyright infringement over his “watch a whole movie in X minutes” videos; Tsai A-ga became embroiled in controversy over employee dismissal; Zhong Mingxuan and Holger Chen clashed repeatedly; Saint was dragged over resurfaced early remarks. The “clean stream” seat became more and more secure on Zun’s head. Among the “Sheng-Huo-Yu-Zun” quartet (Saint, Fang Huo, Xiao Yu, and Zun, also called the “Four Heavenly Kings of YouTube” in 2019), the first three were successively hit by excavated dark histories. Only Zun appeared clean⁸.

But “clean stream” is conferred by fans; the creator has no right to refuse it. Its reverse side is a shackle: once a mistake is made, the backlash will be far greater than for other YouTubers, because viewers feel they have been “deceived.” When an ordinary YouTuber slips up, fans say, “That is just how he is.” When a “clean stream” YouTuber slips up, fans say, “So he is like that too.”

⚠️ Controversial view: The term “clean stream” is itself a kind of moral overload projected onto YouTubers. Why should a young man who reached one million subscribers at 19 have to carry fans’ imagination of “not making mistakes”? In November 2023, that question received a concrete answer.

The 24 Hours of Top War: The First Crack in the Clean-Stream Label

On November 2, 2023, YouTuber Lai Hong-lin exposed in his own video that Zun had accepted a sponsored placement for the mobile game Top War, but the advertisement footage was completely different from the actual game, and Zun had not played it in the video at all; he had simply voiced and performed according to a script provided by the company⁹.

On the night the incident broke, Zun posted a long apology on Instagram Stories. He did not use a public video on his main channel, and he did not livestream. It was just a Story:

“Regarding the controversy over Top War, I need to apologize to everyone. At the beginning, I received five videos from the company, and they hoped I could voice and perform over the footage. I thought at the time that it seemed quite easy to make, so I accepted it carelessly. Later, after someone reminded me, I realized that we had a problem in vetting the game. This was my own negligence.”¹⁰

What cut even more sharply was the part he added:

“Actually, after discovering that this was a shit game, I did not take this advertisement again. I should have asked the advertiser to take down my video at that time.”¹⁰

The three Chinese characters “糞 game” (shit game) stood out glaringly in the apology: he was admitting both that he had failed to vet it and that, after later knowing the game was bad, he still did not proactively stop the damage. The next day, CTWANT’s headline was: “Has the ‘only clean stream in the YT world’ crashed?”⁹.

Four months after the incident, in March 2024, when FTV interviewed Zun, it still called him “the only clean stream in the YT world”¹¹. Fans had not torn off the label, but they already knew there was a crack behind it.

Brother Xiao Yu’s Prison Sentence and “I’m Really Very Tired”

If 2023 was the first crack in the clean-stream label, then 2021 had already produced a deeper one. It is just that most people remember “Xiao Yu’s case” and not “the passage Zun wrote that year.”

On October 17, 2021, the police contacted Zun. The next day, October 18, he posted a message on Instagram Stories apologizing for the Deepfake face-swapping porn case involving his older brother Chu Yu-chen (Xiao Yu)[^13]:

“From the time this happened until now, I have actually been even more shocked than you. Xiao Yu never mentioned to his family what he is doing now. Even now I still feel baffled, and I also do not know what I should say to him anymore.”¹²

The next passage was even heavier:

“I am not going to cut ties with Xiao Yu. He is still my older brother, and that will not change. In my capacity as his younger brother, I apologize for bringing a bad impression to the public, and I say sorry to all the victims. I am truly very sorry. Other than apologizing for him, I really do not know what else I can do. Too many things have happened all at once. I am really very tired.”¹²

“I am really very tired” is a sentence rarely quoted in the history of Taiwanese YouTube, but it may be the most naked thing Zun has ever said. It was not an apology, but a confession: a 23-year-old carrying his brother’s case, carrying viewers’ expectations attached to the “clean stream” label, and carrying the overnight transformation from “two brothers’ channels” into a family-ethics decision over whether someone needed to be cut off. He chose “not to cut ties.”

📝 Curator’s note: Western creators facing a family member’s crime usually distance themselves immediately and issue a public statement saying, in effect, “this has nothing to do with me.” Zun’s “not cutting ties” was another choice: placing family ethics above public image. What that choice later brought him would find an answer at the double-million moment at the end of 2024.

Xiao Yu’s case later went through the full judicial process: five years and six months in the first instance in 2022; reduced to four years and ten months on second instance in 2023; finalized by the Supreme Court on May 8, 2024; and imprisonment began on May 29¹³. In prison, Xiao Yu’s monthly wage was NT$900.

Double Million and the Joss-Paper Dragon Boat from Prison

Time jumps to the end of 2024. Zun’s second channel, “人生魯宅x尊” (handle @nerdzun, created sometime between 2015 and 2017, with third-party sources disagreeing on the date), originally a side line for PVC figurine unboxings, casual shorts, and nonsense edits, also reached one million subscribers¹⁴.

Nearly seven years after his main channel passed one million, this was a “second one million” and the simultaneous establishment of two million-subscriber channels. In Taiwan’s YouTube scene, the creators whose two channels have both exceeded one million subscribers can be counted on one hand: Lao Gao and Xiao Mo’s two channels, Saint’s two channels, and only a few more when Zun is included. For a 27-year-old, the meaning of this achievement lies not in the subscriber count, but in the fact that “I can sustain two content lines with completely different tones at the same time.”

In its January 13, 2025 report, UDN recorded one detail: after Xiao Yu, serving his sentence in prison, learned that his younger brother had achieved double million, he sent Zun a gift from the correctional facility. It was a dragon boat folded from joss paper during his prison time, together with a letter¹⁴.

Outside the prison, the younger brother with two million-subscriber channels.
Inside the prison, the older brother earning NT$900 a month, folding a joss-paper dragon boat by hand in congratulations.

After the storm of 2021, these two brothers did not follow the Western creator model of distance, nor did they take the path of cutting ties. One used a public YouTube channel to record a “prison visit series,” turning his older brother’s situation in prison into subject matter; the other used prison time to fold a paper boat and send it out. Four years later, the words “not cutting ties” had acquired a concrete object as their counterpart. In prison-visit-related videos later uploaded on Zun’s second channel, he speaks calmly about everyday details such as “having to line up for an hour to see my brother” and “speaking for fifteen minutes through glass.” There is no accusation and no beautification, only a record of facts. For Taiwanese viewers, this posture of “my family member committed a crime; I will not cut ties, but I will not speak for you either” is not unusual: in traditional ethics, the dual-track idea that “blood kin is blood kin, right and wrong are right and wrong” is deeply rooted. Zun’s decision to move it onto a public YouTube channel instead became a rare contemporary demonstration.

📝 Curator’s note: The double million is less like a sequel to success studies than a moment when two completely unequal life trajectories are placed side by side. If one had to choose a single anchor to represent Zun in 2024, this joss-paper dragon boat would be more precise than 1.71 million subscribers.

Age 27: Renting, a Used Car, and Outside the Winner’s Circle

In March 2024, ETtoday interviewed Zun. On camera, he said a passage that was later repeatedly quoted by various media outlets:

“From birth until now, every home I have lived in has been rented, and the car I drive is a ten-year-old used car. I go abroad about two or three times a year. I probably do not count as what people call a winner in life. Maybe your classmates around you are all more winning than I am.”¹⁵

FTV’s 2024 report added the half-sentence that followed: “But I have a girlfriend and cats, so I’m winning na~”¹¹, half joking and half serious.

His girlfriend’s real name has not appeared in public reports. Her Instagram account is @laurenveur; she is an engineer nicknamed “Lauren.” On May 30, 2022, when Lauren’s channel reached 50,000 subscribers, the two filmed a Q&A video titled “Honestly Answering 50 Questions,” formally making their relationship public¹⁶. In Newtalk’s report from the same period, Lauren recalled that she first met Zun through Zun’s younger brother “Xiao Yu”; the two decided to be together in only three days, without any deliberate confession¹⁷. When asked “Will you get married?”, both answered without hesitation: “Yes.” In the comments under the Q&A video, what people mentioned most was not whether the two were sweet, but that “Zun smiles more now.”

By December 13, 2025, the main channel uploaded a video titled “My! New! Home!”[^20]: the first time Zun introduced a home he had bought in a public video. From recording Minecraft commentary in his room at age 14 to titling a video “my new home” at 27, the line had stretched across 13 years. In the video, he did not flaunt the house or deliberately display its price range. He talked more instead about trivialities such as “finally not having to follow a landlord’s rules” and “Lauren and I argued for a week over whether the sofa should go here or there.” Within three months of upload, the video accumulated tens of thousands of comments. The highest-temperature comments were not things like “the house is so big,” but a sentence along the lines of: “Seeing Zun really have a home of his own makes me feel at ease.” When fans grow older together with a creator, they feel happy that he is finally no longer renting, as if they were happy for a classmate of their own. In Taiwan’s YouTube scene, this kind of long-term relationship in which “fans become almost family” is not common; most million-subscriber followings are built on topicality rather than companionship. Zun’s two channels happen to be the opposite. Much of the subject matter is aimless, everyday, and about “what Lauren, the cats, and I do at home.” This seemingly unfocused content has instead nurtured the stickiest viewer structure.

A-Shen (chaoneat, born in 1992) is six years older than Zun. In 2022, when he was 28, he founded KAMIKAMI BURGER, opening a burger business and cooperating with 50 restaurants in a cloud-kitchen model; on September 10, 2023, he announced that he would permanently stop updating YouTube on October 15, his 31st birthday¹⁸, switching to a side-business-owner track. Tsai A-ga (born in 1984) is 14 years older than Zun. At age 30, in 2014, he had already stabilized his company, Dtoufo Entertainment; later he married, had children, and moved into a family-oriented route¹⁹, with his wife Er Bo and their sons becoming part of the channel’s content.

Zun is not yet 30. He is now in the same transition-age range as A-Shen, but his path is different: A-Shen shifted to B2C food service and stopped YouTube; Zun kept YouTube, but lowered the intensity, split content through a secondary channel, and added home ownership and a stable relationship. He chose to change tracks, not to leave the field.

💡 Did you know: In 2024, media outlets such as Liberty Times Entertainment and The Storm Media were calling it a “major YouTuber retreat” and saying “influencers moving toward a family route is a prelude to exit”²⁰. But Zun’s two channels were still growing in subscribers, and his second channel had just reached one million. That “prelude to exit” framing does not apply to him. “Slowing down” means leaving the field for some creators; for others, it means changing tracks. The difference lies in whether a second curve is growing at the same time.

“But I Have a Girlfriend and Cats”

Placed back into the larger map of Taiwanese YouTube, Zun was the youngest million-subscriber creator in the 2014-2018 wave. That group is now generally approaching or just past 30, and everyone is facing the same question: how to define themselves for the next decade. Tsai A-ga took the family route, A-Shen shifted into food entrepreneurship, HowHow manages his identity as the king of sponsored content, and Lao Gao and Xiao Mo, because they started later, are still in an acceleration phase.

Zun’s chosen path can be summarized in one sentence: keep YouTube, but let it become part of life instead of compressing life into YouTube. The double-million channels are only mid-game evidence of this choice, not its endpoint. As he described himself in an interview: “I am not trying to leave this industry. I just need to learn how to do this while living.”

The “clean stream” label was never a talent. Chen Chun-chieh’s kind of “clean stream,” defined by refusing donations, and Zun’s kind of “clean stream,” defined by “not causing major incidents but still causing minor ones,” are both essentially fans’ moral projections onto creators. When a projection lasts long enough, a creator either gets crushed by it (taking bad sponsored content and crashing, or having family dark histories dug up), or learns to treat it like a coat: wear it when it is cold, take it off when it is hot.

That March 2024 line, “But I have a girlfriend and cats, so I’m winning na~,” may be the way Zun found to take it off after the “clean stream” label passed its tenth year. He did not try to tear off the label. Instead, he let fans see the 27-year-old person underneath it: rented housing, a used car, the joss-paper dragon boat from his brother, weekends arguing with Lauren over where to put the sofa, and the video schedule table behind two channels. Those everyday things do not count as “winner in life” material, but they did indeed exist.

For the viewers who grew up watching Zun in the 2014-2018 wave, this article is, in a sense, also their own mirror. The YouTuber they followed in high school is now entering, alongside them, the zone of 27, 28, and 30, facing home buying, stable relationships, side businesses, and family storms. A generation of Taiwanese young people is learning one thing on the same timeline: how to move from “fast” to “enough.” Zun’s story does not need to be packaged in an inspirational frame, because it is real enough not to need packaging.

✦ Perhaps the so-called “clean stream” was never a posture of being so clean that one remains untouched by the world, but the willingness to admit one has been touched by the world and still slowly wash oneself every day.

Further Reading:

• HowHow — A million-subscriber YouTuber from the same period, and another model of transformation as the king of sponsored content
• Tsai A-ga — A Taiwanese YouTuber 14 years older than Zun who completed the family-route arc, offering a deeper point of comparison
• History of YouTube in Taiwan — The overall map from the 2010 incubation period to the 2024 major retreat

References