Perfection in Motion: How I Fell in Love with China’s Super Girl

Super Girl

Therefore, it is easy to see why one of the reasons Bibi enjoys the following she does is that she has never – as they say – let success go to her head. Her path to the top of the music world in China has been like a ride on a rocketship, which is where the Hollywood story no one would ever believe enters into the narrative.

In 2005, Bibi was in a four-year undergraduate program at the Xinghai Conservatory of Music in Guangzhou. Her efforts to find a niche in the popular music world in a Chinese popular music scene, which was largely one-dimensional and uninspiring at the time, had fallen flat and she had just about given up making a career out of popular music.

Without her knowledge, one of her friends entered her in a Chinese version of American Idol called Super Girl. She was only 19 at the time. She dragged herself out of bed one morning for the first round of auditions without washing her face, brushing her hair, or even applying makeup and was wearing one of her father’s two-and-a-half-sizes-too-large for her old coats. The security guard at the audition hall almost did not let her in thinking she was a homeless boy rather than a young, aspiring female singer.

Once the competition began Bibi was the voice to beat throughout all of the preliminary rounds until the final performances in July 2005 in Changsha, capital of Hunan province. The August finale pulled in some 400 million viewers — in case you were wondering, this is 10 to 15 times the number of viewers for any American Idol broadcast.

She barely missed winning first and ended up a close second place.

As has been written about several times, one of her final performances — the one where she sang A-Mei Chang’s Relief (解脱) — earned her a standing ovation from the five judges, even moving one of them to tears. She has been known as one of the original Super Girls ever since.

It was during the Super Girl competition that Bibi acquired the massive following that remains zealously devoted to her. Attend any of her performances today and you find yourself surrounded by a sea of (mostly young) girls wearing green shirts, the color of her fan club, and an assortment of green headgear – all of them armed with a pair of green battery-powered glow sticks. All of them know every word of every one of her songs and sing with her in unison during the performance.

The Super Girl competition was also where her unique singing voice, and the personal stamp she puts on nearly all the material she performs, acquired its own name in China ​— the Bi Style Vocal (筆式唱腔) — a sound not heard anyplace else in the world, as unique in its own way as the Bossa Nova sound is to Brazil.