'I'm just a China girl'

Radio 3's Asia-Pacific world music winner insists she's her own woman.

IT'S EARLY APRIL, AND AT DINGwalls Club in Camden, north London, the BBC Radio 3 Asia-Pacific Award for World Music has just gone to 24-year-old Sa Dingding. "I'm just a China girl!" she says, as a group of photographers flash their cameras, paparazzi-style.

She's dressed every inch like an Asian pop princess – hair piled in tiny plaits, a thick layer of gold bling around her neck, a red and white silk couture Chinese dress. As she tells me in the glass-fronted offices of Universal Records earlier the same day, she is "a modern Chinese girl, people old and young they like me … It's the ancient words of my songs the old people love and the young people like the electronica."

So what does it mean to be a modern Chinese girl? Sa Dingding tells me how she comes from a Chinese-style one-child family: her father is Han-Chinese while her doctor mother comes from Inner Mongolia. The Sa bit of her name is Mongol while Dingding means "the best", making her "the best from Mongolia". She began singing pop covers in her early teens while living with her parents in eastern and then central China. When they moved to Beijing she studied music at the Technical Arts School, coming second in the National Youth Singing Competition. She was spotted by one of China's dance music producers, who recorded her singing over his electronic music and made her into something of a dance music star.

She discovered more traditional sounds, learning to play the ancient zheng (zither) and the Mongolian horse-hair fiddle, and began writing her own songs. A demo, made "with a friend who did the computing side of the music", came to the attention of Universal Records China who took her to a meeting of Universal bosses in Japan, who saw the global potential of a talented, attractive Chinese singer in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.

At this point I am torn between her fresh enthusiasm and laughter ("Sorry for my English") and wondering how far she has been primed to speak the language of feminine individualism with folk music resonances while actually being fashioned as a company product.

As we sip peppermint tea out of takeaway cups she comes across as self-assured and focused, answering questions in pretty good English, clarified by a female interpreter as young as she is. She knows how to tell her story, this modern Chinese girl in four-inch snakeskin heels, her beautiful features framed by huge false eyelashes, her long fringe part of a silky sheath of black hair stretching way past her bum. All the time she's holding two bright woollen pom-poms, the kind young children make at nursery as soft balls. They turn out to be earrings she made herself. "Yes," she says, "I like to decide everything about myself and my music."

Mojo magazine neatly summed her up as "Crouching Tiger meets the Cocteau Twins" and her publicity shots – featuring the classic Dunhuang stone Buddha known throughout Asia, and ribbon panels of ethnic materials – is as broad a multi-racial identity marker as her music. She sings not only in Mandarin but Tibetan, Mantra, Sanskrit and her own made-up language, representing the minority Lagu Lugu people whose language she tells me is fast approaching extinction. "I am interested in the way different languages hold melody and emotion," she tells me.

For her first six years she spent spring and summer with her grandmother, travelling nomadic-fashion across the Mongolian grasslands. "I miss that time: every day is free, every day is play. I heard people singing freely for everything in their lives, for their animals, for nature." She draws on these memories, describing how she wrote a song in Mandarin in memory of her grandmother but it did not "have the love inside it" so, she says, "I searched into my deep memory and the words of the song came and the people listening in the studio cried. I think it is the child's memory of the words with the grandmother."

We look together at the Tibetan texts beautifully set out in script in the CD booklet of her album, Alive. I notice the lyrics of many of her songs have other people's names by them. "I find them in ancient books," she says. "I love the old cultures of my people. I use my modern eyes to look back at Chinese heritage. My heart gets full."

Inevitably we talk about Tibet. Our meeting is only days after the London protests during the passing of the Olympic flame and I explain that for many in the UK Tibet brings to mind Chinese occupation. She offers a different picture: "China culture is mix of Tibetan and Mongolian and other cultures for many thousands of years and I stand for China culture." It seems her songs with sacred Tibetan texts became so popular in Tibet that she has now been there four times.

A far cry from the roots musicians who normally feature in the world music awards, Sa Dingding is planning to play the Albert Hall Poll Winner's Concert in July, backed by four dancing kung fu monks. "I see myself as a bridge between China and the world," she tells me. Then she shakes my hand and runs up the stairs to meet some people from German TV – the 37th interview of her visit.

• Alive is out now on Wrasse Records. More information at www.sadingding.co.uk