Tour Guide - Tracy Yu

Tracy (Yu Chen)

Tracy at Terracotta Warriors Museum, Xi'an

With great passion in sharing the history, culture, and beauty of my country, I have worked as a tour guide/leader for TravelChinaGuide.com since 2005. My out-going and optimistic personality brings me a lot of joy working as a tour guide. Loving to share my knowledge about the country, to answer questions of people from all around the world, to show them different aspects of China, to lead them to interact with local people, I value my role as a "CEO", i.e., "China Experience Officer" and “Culture Exchange Officer”.

I always like to travel and seek adventure. This is also an important reason that I enjoy being a tour guide. The more I travel, the more I know about my country. On the other hand, I have improved myself greatly after these years of work, not only my skills in tour guiding, from hour-to-hour scheduling to unexpected situations, from organization to communication, but also the knowledge of my own country and different cultures from all over the world.

There are some very important points I learnt and applied to myself, which have helped me be a good guide and enjoy being a tour guide. First of all, love your country. In China, there are many problems, just as many other countries have. There is such a trend in China that some people would deny the whole country because of these problems. I always think it is so important to find the beauty of it. For example, thousands of people travel past the Bell Tower in Xi'an each day. Yes, most people would say, it is just a tower. That’s because most people just pass by, or just take a look at it for a few seconds. It takes time to find the beauty within it. After learning the history of it, listening to the stories about it, and looking at it from different angles or even at different times, you will find it such an interesting and valuable building. It is important for us to keep upgrading our knowledge and understanding of the places we visit. If a tour guide doesn’t understand the beauty of the country and love the country, how can the tour group enjoy visiting the country and sharing the passion for its beauty?

Secondly, be patient and try your best to look at things from the point of view of people from other parts of the world. Sometimes, people would ask some “funny” questions. But for a tour guide/tour leader, there is no “funny” question. Tracy, why are all the trucks blue in China? Why do people ride bikes without wearing a helmet? For us who live in the country, these things are so normal. However, for people who ask these questions, they are not. They are from a different country, and expect answers to these questions.

Thirdly, be confident and calm down, especially when some accidents or unexpected things happen. There must be such a situation, somewhere someday. Be ready for such things, take it easy!

It is rewarding to be a tour guide. I never forget the words from one of my guests: “Tracy, you are a gem.” I would like to continue to be a tour guide/tour leader, and keep getting better.