Young Yeezus! Rare childhood picture of Kanye West

North West’s childhood isn’t the only one that dad Kanye West wants to keep private: The Yeezus singer is famously stingy with details and images of his younger years. However, he likely isn’t upset about the picture painted by a fan on Rap Genius.

In a post yesterday, a user named “Frak” shared the top photo of a young Kanye. He added how the picture came into his possession…

The Story: This is crazy. My dad is an astronomy professor, and we just had dinner with his astronomy advisor from Harvard. He asked what I was into and I told him about my ventures into hip-hop (I’m a rapper/producer). He asked if I knew about Kanye West, and obviously being a Ye stan I kept my cool and told him yes. He then told me that him and Donda West were good friends and co-teachers in China, and he got to spend a great deal of time playing with Kanye as a kid. Out of nowhere he whips out this picture and my jaw-drops. He said Kanye was a really sweet kid who wasn’t afraid to speak to adults and ask questions.

(The astronomy advisor is presumably one of the others in the picture.)

According to Donda West’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times, Donda and Kanye lived in Nanjing in the late 1980s when she was a Fulbright scholar.

Kanye previously said his year in China prepared him for his future career.

“I think being in China got me ready to be a celeb because, at that time, a lot of Chinese had never seen a black person. They would always come up and also stare at me, fishbowl me and everything,” he told Sabotage Times in 2011. “And that’s kind of the way it is for me right now.”