David Bowie’s ‘China Girl’ says music video changed her life
Video shoot and brief romance with ‘beautiful, just beautiful’ Bowie that followed were like a dream, says Geeling Ching, who last saw him in 2004 when he toured her native New Zealand
In 1983,Geeling Ching was 23 years old and waiting tables at a Sydney cafe when she was chosen to play the lead role in the music video for David Bowie’s China Girl.
She says the music video and the brief romance with Bowie that followed in the 1980s were like a surreal dream and a life changer.
The death of the British rock star from cancer this week at age 69 stunned fans worldwide. New Zealand-born Ching was watching a tennis tournament in Auckland, where she lives, when her phone started buzzing: is it true?
She was already a fan when she met Bowie. As a teenager, she’d put Bowie’s posters up on her bedroom wall and bought one of his albums. “There was something quite other-worldly about him,” she says. “He was beautiful. Just beautiful.”
It’s had the biggest influence on my life that I could have ever imagined
The video parodies Asian stereotypes and went on to win an MTV award. At the time, the unedited version was banned from New Zealand and some other countries for a raunchy scene on a beach.
Ching says she and Bowie, then in his mid-30s, were naked for the scene, but it wasn’t romantic.
