Her father was a music teacher, and her mother was a stage actor and dancer. She describes herself as a very shy child who found that she best expressed herself through acting and performing. She was born during the Cultural Revolution when her parents were treated cruelly due to the fact that they were teachers. Soon after her birth, she moved to Sichuan to live with her grandmother. She became a "soldier" in the People's Liberation Army in Tibet at the age of 14. Her main activity there was to entertain with musical theater. She has starred in seven feature films and has appeared in many plays.

She came to New York in 1991 to attend New York University's film department as a visiting scholar. Since that time, she has appeared in a number of American movies including Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), Beautiful Country (2003), My Baby's Mama (2003), and Paris (2003). Some of Bai Ling's early movies include Shan cun feng yue (1987), Hu guang (1988) as Jing Huan, The Crow (1994) as Myca, and Dead Funny (1994) as Noriko.