Who was the real woman behind David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s ‘China Girl’?
As his wardrobe rack of alter egos will attest, David Bowie was a man of many colours. His career ebbed and flowed through an astonishing series of stylistic changes, both sonically and visually. Some chapters extracted the big bucks with runaway chart domination, while others pushed the boundaries of musical convention, sealing his unparalleled legacy.
After an uneven start to his career in the late 1960s, Bowie truly arrived as a global sensation in 1972 with the emergence of Ziggy Stardust and his titular album. Over the following years, Bowie dug his way toward the middle of the decade, gradually shedding his glam-rock skin in favour of more soulful exploits, highlighted by 1975’s Young Americans. After a funky pitstop in 1976, fittingly named Station to Station, Bowie progressed to the most intriguing period of his work, the so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy’.
After The Stooges’ classic Bowie-produced album, Raw Power, arrived in 1973, the band split up in disarray as frontman Iggy Pop fell into a spiralling drug habit. This dark patch for the provocative proto-punk icon soon hit its nadir as he checked into a Californian mental institute to get his head straight. In 1976, his loyal friend Bowie saw the institute as a defeatist move and invited Iggy to join him on his Isolar Tour.
At the end of the tour, Iggy and Bowie agreed to physically distance themselves from their addictions. The location of choice was Château d’Hérouville, the same French location where Bowie recorded his covers album, Pin-Ups, in 1973. It was here that Bowie began recording his 1977 masterpiece Low, which would become the first instalment of the ‘Berlin Trilogy’. Meanwhile, Bowie helped Iggy establish a solo career, beginning with his masterpiece debut album, The Idiot.
While still in France, before an eventual relocation to Germany, Iggy and Bowie worked together to write and record ‘China Girl’ and ‘Nightclubbing’. In the former, Iggy sings of a “China Girl”, ostensibly made of china and from China. In the dark lyrics, he threatens to pulverise her and her culture by imposing Western values of materialism and superficial beauty on her. “I’ll give you television, I’ll give you eyes of blue, I’ll give you a man who wants to rule the world,” the lyrics read.
While Iggy released the hit on his 1977 debut, it didn’t reach its full commercial power until 1983, when Bowie gave it an ’80s pop-tinged revival fit for the dancefloor on his blockbusting album Let’s Dance. For over four decades, fans of the co-writing duo have speculated who this “China Girl” might be. In the 2018 documentary American Valhalla, Iggy finally shone some direct light on the subject of his warning, revealing that it was a real woman – somebody’s wife, that he “got to know”.
Elsewhere in the scene, Josh Homme reads a typed note from Iggy that mentions the woman’s partner as a French singer. This concurs with long-touted rumours that Iggy’s “China Girl” was Kuelan Nguyen, an attractive Vietnamese woman who had been in a non-marital relationship with French singer Jacques Higelin.
In Bowie’s biography titled Starman, author Paul Trynka notes that Nguyen was indeed the subject of the song and Iggy’s infatuation while he and Bowie were in France. She would frequent the studio where they were working, and Bowie reportedly encouraged their affair. Other sources also suggest a double entendre, given that “China White” is slang for heroin.
Listen to Iggy Pop and David Bowie’s versions of ‘China Girl’ below.
