Siqingerile, an ethnic Mongolian rock star, recently released her autobiography How Far Is My Dream from You, sharing the bittersweet journey of pursuing her music dream for more than 25 years.

"There were a lot of people asking, 'Where did this girl come from?' when I first got under the spotlight," says Siqingerile, who became famous overnight in 1999 through her performance on the opening ceremony of the Guangxi Folk Songs Festival.

She was singing a remixed version of the Folk Songs Like the Spring River, a classic Guangxi folk song about a local legend. She added elements of rock 'n' roll, and her signature style of high-pitched singing proved to be a great success.

"I want to answer the question by telling what my life was like before I got famous, so that people will know that I did not come out of nowhere," Siqingerile said during the book launch in Beijing in April.

The book starts with her childhood memories to the initial years of her career in Shenzhen and Beijing, and ends with her becoming established by the early 2000s.

Born in 1968 in Xilinhot, a county-level city in the Inner Mongolian autonomous region, Siqingerile is the third daughter of her family. She went to the regional capital of Hohhot to study dancing in an arts school.

Siqingerile received five years of professional training in dancing and after graduation she joined a local song-and-dance ensemble as a dancer.

However, she gradually found that her passion was music and started to teach herself how to play bass in 1989.

"Music and dance are linked. I got exposed to a lot of music when I danced, and found myself more in love with music than dancing."

Although Siqingerile was turned down by the director of the ensemble who said that she didn't have a singing talent, she didn't give it up and kept practicing bass part-time after daily dance training.

The next year, Siqingerile formed her first band, Hawk, with three friends, and played at a local concert with some rock bands from Beijing. Then she began to channel all her energy into music.

In 1991, the band went down south to Shenzhen, the most open city in China at the time, hoping to earn enough money to buy better instruments. During the next three years, they played in various bars in the suburb of Shenzhen.

"We earned a lot more in Shenzhen than in Inner Mongolia, but I found my playing become so machine-like that it started to drain my well of inspiration," she said in a previous interview with China Daily.

In 1994, the band went to Beijing, the birthplace of Chinese rock music, seeking to develop their creative rock 'n' roll style.

"Although there was a sense of confidence in us when we first came to Beijing, it turned into a growing bleakness from the pressures of life in subsequent years," recalls Siqingerile. They lived in shabby hostels, didn't get stable jobs and had no place for rehearsals. Sometimes they lived on cheap instant noodles. Meanwhile, other band members got addicted to drugs and the band fell apart. But she still knew music was her life and love.

The turning point came in 1999 when she was noticed by Zang Tianshuo, who was an established musician and invited her to join his band. After her success at the Guangxi Folk Songs Festival, Siqingerile released her first album, New Age, and became a popular singer and bassist.

"Looking back, there is no shortcut for success. Love for music and never giving up brought me to where I am now," says Siqingerile.

In 2014, Siqingerile founded a new band, Cactus, which is made up of musicians from different ethnic groups including Uygur, Kazak, Tibetan and Mongolian, and they aim to remix 56 classic folk songs of the 56 ethnic groups in China with modern music.

(China Daily 06/24/2015 page19)