Xia Guo is a visually impaired vlogger who loves the guitar and music. He is also the new “big brother” of guide dog Youbao and a winner of Bilibili’s 2024 Best Work award.
He isn’t especially outgoing, but he always stays positive. As the line in his profile says, “Sunlight can’t reach my eyes, but it can reach my heart”, and his videos constantly carry a healing power.
Today we want to introduce this friend who still shines in the dark by sharing the story of Xia Guo and his guitar.
Xia Guo first touched a guitar in the summer after middle school. With his exams over, he stayed home playing video games; his family didn’t want him on the computer all the time, so they signed him up for a guitar class at a music shop in the county town. The fee was five or six hundred yuan a month, and it came with a cheap starter guitar.
Every morning he caught the bus to arrive in town for class at half past nine and rode back after eleven. It was a hot summer, and he went every day for a month, rain or shine. The shop owner wasn’t a great player, but Xia Guo is grateful: that was where he got to know the guitar.
High school in Hebei Province came with heavy exam pressure, leaving little time for hobbies. Only when he went home for the monthly break could he listen to fingerstyle albums online and teach himself from videos by Chen Liang, who back then still had platinum-blond hair. In three years he picked up barre chords, hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides and harmonics, but never managed to play a complete piece.
After the college entrance exam, his father signed him up for another guitar class. This teacher was a bit better, but taught things Xia Guo had already learned by himself, so he quit before the summer was half over. That was the summer he turned eighteen: the buses had switched from diesel to electric, and he had gone from a naive boy to a soon-to-be university student.
During the university clubs fair, he saw someone play Chen Liang’s “Untitled” right in front of him for the first time. He thought it was cool and admired it deeply, yet also felt a quiet urge to compete: why could he do it and not me? So he added the senior on WeChat, and they became good friends. The senior taught him what artificial harmonics, palm muting and tapping were. That was where he truly began learning the guitar.
With the senior’s help, he learned the whole of “Untitled” in just 13 days.
On 3 August 2019 he was working part-time as a teaching assistant at a music shop. During an afternoon lesson his vision began to blur, more and more, until he could no longer see his students’ faces. He thought it was just a cold making him see spots, so he rinsed his eyes, lay down and closed them, but when he opened them again nothing had changed.
His parents took him to Beijing for treatment. The diagnosis was retinal detachment, which meant he would lose his sight completely.
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At first, facing the darkness, time felt long and hard to bear, and Xia Guo often felt restless. Guitar and music became as necessary to him as eating and drinking. A day without playing felt like something was missing, and once he picked up the guitar, he could play all day.
Xia Guo covers Wang Yemin’s “Yang”. Guitar: Kepma B1
In January 2020 he suddenly remembered a piece he had learned while he could still see, Sunao Nakagawa’s “Clarence”, but he had forgotten some passages. So he showed his mother photos of the tab, taught her how to read it, and she read it to him note by note. Before long, he had got the piece back.
Day after day of darkness did not defeat him. With his mother’s company and help, Xia Guo learned many new pieces and his playing improved by leaps and bounds. Later he began entering guitar competitions and achieved excellent results in several editions of the Kepma Cup.
Being admitted to the School of Special Education at Changchun University was a whole new start for Xia Guo.
At school he relearned how to dress, eat and go out independently, learned to use a computer with a screen reader, and learned to make music in Reaper, which by chance laid the groundwork for his later video creation. He explored more and more places: collecting takeaway at the west gate, eating at the second canteen across the footbridge, the more distant parcel station, even Jingyuetan in late autumn.
During the 2024 Spring Festival, a friend sent him a travel video by a visually impaired girl and said he could try it too. At first he resisted: as a socially anxious person, he thought it would be awkward. But his mother encouraged him to try, not to become famous, just to keep some memories of university life. She paid for an action camera; at two or three thousand yuan, it pained him for quite a while.
How to film? How to edit? How to upload? Back then, all of this was a challenge for Xia Guo. But he has always liked to push himself. Unable to see the camera, he edited by ear: he kept talking while recording, then cut the silent parts and stitched the footage together from imagination and memory. With the help of a screen reader and the music library in his memory for background tracks, he worked it out step by step until the whole process ran smoothly.
At first his videos drew little response. But from May that year, they were suddenly being watched by many people.
On 19 June 2024, 29 million people accompanied him all the way in a video of him stumbling from the canteen back to his dorm.
On 5 January 2025, without being one of Bilibili’s Top 100 creators, he received the “2024 Best Work Award”.
Viewers say his videos show them genuine human kindness and the purest warmth, and give them the courage to keep living. He says he feels humbled and grateful, never imagining he could be so useful to people or so loved.
In November 2023, Xia Guo brought Youbao home from the Dalian guide dog base, and his profile gained a new line: “new big brother of guide dog Youbao”. With Youbao, he says, he can finally use the word “freedom”. When Youbao slows down, he knows there is a step or obstacle ahead; a steady pace means the way is clear. “Without exaggeration, Youbao is my eyes,” he says. Since swapping the white cane for a lead, he walks faster and is no longer so nervous going out. Youbao rides the subway and flies with him, moved into his new home with him, and walks with him through city after city, unlocking a bigger map.
A bookish, optimistic pessimist: that is how he describes himself.
He has two original pieces, “Cold Pine” and “Fireflies in Your Eyes”. Their melodies are bright and light; it is hard to imagine they come from a guitarist living in darkness.
Xia Guo’s original fingerstyle piece “Cold Pine”. Guitar: Kepma B1
The light that reaches Xia Guo’s heart is not only music, but also the most precious thing in the world: human warmth. Family, friends and every stranger he meets on the road make him feel grateful, he says, and every day feels full of warmth and love.
We asked Xia Guo: if you could say one thing to people who are also in darkness, physically or emotionally, what would it be?
He said: life will find its own way, like grass growing through a crack in the stone. You are far stronger than you think. Don’t give up; find a reason to live again, and one day you will regain your confidence.
