Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted – in one moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?

Sometimes music speaks to us. The messages presented by artists are profound because we can relate or sympathize. They can open our eyes and hearts. Other times, it is purely a form of escapism.

I listened to the above introduction to Eminem’s Lose Yourself in April of 2005. I was still a fresh-faced China rookie, desperately seeking anything with English content to keep my mind intact. My students spoke in Chinese. The old people in the garden chirped like excited crickets, in Chinese. The infomercials for breast enlargement creams I watched, both repelled and amazed, were in Chinese. I realized I was in China, and there was very little of my native language to be heard.

I had hated rap music most of life. I hated rap the way Republicans hate anything that signifies change or progress. I hated rap music more than death and taxes. Being the archetypical angry young man, I hated a lot of things.

I heard the Jay Z and Linkin Park’s mash-up project Collision Course while at a colleague’s apartment. It was palatable, no, more than that: I caught myself nodding to the beat of 99 Problems, and trying to follow the lyrics. Another colleague used the headphone on his office computer as makeshift speakers. He played a lot of Eminem. I’m not much of sheep, my musical tastes have always been my own, but one night I picked up an Eminem CD at a local shop. I took it home thinking I would hate it and had wasted 10 kuai. I put it in the player and heard:

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted – in one moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?

That spoke to me. That was me. Yes I had. Yes I did. That was the genesis of my life in China. It continued:

Oh, there goes Rabbit, he choked
He’s so mad, but he won’t give up that easy
No, he won’t have it

Yes, that was me. Not a rapper (my rap skills leave listeners wondering if there is a verbal form of epilepsy). I hadn’t given up. No, I wouldn’t have it.

No more games, I’m gonna change what you call rage,
Tear this mother-fucking roof off like two dogs caged.
I was playing in the beginning, but the mood all changed.
I been chewed up and spit out and booed off stage.
But I kept rhyming and step-writing the next cypher
Best believe somebody’s paying the pied piper
All the pain inside amplified by the fact
That I can’t get by with my 9 to 5

Ever have a music moment that stuns you? A moment of true connection? I had heard little of Eminem, mostly news items about his homophobic comments and violence-laced lyrics. I dismissed him as another thug rapper, a homogeneous group that I hated on general principal.

He was speaking to me. In that song, in that moment. I heard. I understood. I had lived the words he artfully spat at the microphone. My pain was amplified by my inability to live with the prescribed North American 9 to 5 lifestyle. I wanted more. I wanted to do something big. I wanted to tear the roof off.

Music has many powers. It can inspire, heal, amaze, and provide connections never thought possible. I learned about another angry young man that evening, learned I wasn’t the only one wanting more than what I had been told I needed. My vision, musical and personal, had been opened to a new realm. Fate is strange.