When Kanye West Lived in China

Last weekend marked a decade since Kanye West released 808s and Heartbreak. The album’s significance has grown with hindsight, but its 10th birthday still wasn’t the most widely-celebrated musical milestone and it probably would’ve passed me by if I hadn’t happened to stumble across a post about it from a contact on my WeChat moments. 

But then it got me thinking: if it was a decade since the release of that record, then it was just over a decade since Kanye performed his first (and to date only) concert in Shanghai — and just over a decade since I spoke to him about his time living in China as a child.

On November 3 2008, Kanye played a show at Shanghai Grand Stage, a venue which sounds, well, grand, but is basically just an old, echoey indoor gymnasium. Ticket sales hadn’t gone as well as they should, but they weren’t so bad that he refused to take to the stage (looking at you here, Nicki Minaj). He also had some problems with his mic that night when he tried to tease a little “Love Lockdown” toward the end of the show.

I had a media pass that I managed to convince a security person was a backstage pass, but by the time I got to his (very modest) dressing room a few minutes after the concert had ended, Kanye had bolted. I don’t think he was all that impressed with his first official show in China.

Which was a shame, because until that point the country had held some important, and in some cases happier, memories for him. As a 10-year-old, Kanye had spent a while living in Nanjing when his mother Donda was a lecturer at Nanjing University in 1987 as part of a Fulbright Scholarship.

In an attempt by the promoters to help drum up the less-than-stellar ticket sales for his Shanghai show, I was somehow offered the opportunity to get on the phone with Kanye a few weeks before and interview him for the now-defunct weekly listings magazine I was at at the time. After several hours of delays, I managed to reach him in his hotel room in Rio. I opened with a softball question along the lines of “how’s Brazil?” and he fired back that he didn’t know because he’d only been able to look at it out the window while doing press all morning. It probably wasn’t the best start.

I threw out some questions about his upcoming album, 808s, which we hadn’t really heard anything from yet and Kanye was good enough to go through the motions on that. But then I asked him about coming back to China and his time here as a child. His mood shifted significantly — this wasn’t something he was used to talking about in interviews and he couldn’t just rely on stock answers.

“China was a time where me and my mom spent the most time together, we spent a year together, and she used to homeschool me," he told me. "I was in school and I wasn’t doing so good, but it was actually because I was bored and after she homeschooled me I did so good on the tests they put me two grades above in a lot of different courses.

“We really connected there, so it’ll probably be very emotional for me to go back to China. As soon as you, y’know, feel the energy and hit the ground and see familiar sights from your childhood, and familiar smells — which is the most memorable sense of all — it’ll take me right back to fifth grade with my mom.”

Before she passed away, his mother had also recounted tales of a young Kanye breakdancing on the streets for yangrouchuan (lamb skewers) or small change.

For a bit of extra Kanye in China trivia, one of the people he supposedly crossed paths with in Nanjing was a kid called Hua Dong. Hua would go on to become the frontman of post-punk band Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, or Re-TROS.

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