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Kanye West · S1 E3
Nanjing
A year in China at age ten, and the world suddenly gets bigger
A schoolyard in Nanjing, China, 1987. A ten-year-old Black kid from the South Side of Chicago stands surrounded by children who have never seen anyone who looks like him, and for the first time in his life, Kanye West is completely invisible and completely visible at the same time.
"Good Morning" (2007). The animated Graduation opener about waking up in a strange new world. The bear character breaks free from everything familiar, which is exactly what ten-year-old Kanye experienced landing in Nanjing.
The Fulbright
In 1987, Donda West wins a Fulbright fellowship to teach English at Nanjing University. Most single mothers would leave their kid with family. Donda packs Kanye's bags and brings him along, enrolling him in a local school where he doesn't speak the language and nobody looks like him.
“It was like being on another planet. People would come up and touch my skin. But it taught me that different is not wrong. Different is just different.”
— Kanye West, interview with Jon Caramanica, The New York Times, 2013
TAP TO REVEAL: What did Kanye learn in China that shows up in his music decades later?
Good Morning, Kanye West (2007)
The opening track of Graduation doubles as Kanye's thesis statement: every new chapter starts with disorientation. The beat samples Elton John's "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," pitching the vocal up into something alien and childlike. Listen for the way the drums don't fully kick in until the second verse, mirroring that feeling of slowly finding your footing in an unfamiliar place. The animated music video follows Kanye's bear mascot escaping a small world into a vast, overwhelming one.
Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
Where Donda taught English literature as a Fulbright Scholar in 1987-1988. One of China's most prestigious universities, founded in 1902, on the banks of the Yangtze River.
Coming Home Changed
When Kanye returns to Chicago in 1988, he is not the same kid who left. He has seen a world beyond the South Side, beyond America. The experience plants a seed that blooms years later: the conviction that he belongs everywhere, not just where people expect him.
Bonus Listening
"Everything I Am" from Graduation (2007). Kanye raps over a DJ Premier beat about identity, about being told he's not enough of one thing or too much of another. "Everything I'm not made me everything I am." The thesis of a kid who learned in Nanjing that not fitting in can be a superpower.
Why did Kanye spend a year in China as a child?
Back in Chicago, Kanye is a teenager with a worldview most adults don't have. Next: a Korg keyboard, a drum machine, and the moment music takes over everything.
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