How one man's stolen iPhone made him an internet celebrity in China
While searching for a photo to Instagram, he discovered that his supposedly private photo stream had been inundated with photos of a Chinese man taking selfies in front of an orange tree.
Who was this man? Where did this orange tree come from? Stopera had no idea.
Worried that he had been hacked, Stopera brought his phone to the nearest Apple store. An employee asked if his phone had been stolen recently and Stopera thought back to a blearly night in the East Village when he had lost an iPhone a year before. "Yes," he answered, his phone had been stolen a while ago but he had since replaced it.
Um, I just looked at my phone's photo stream and it's full of pics of some guy and an orange tree I def didn't take. pic.twitter.com/s8srj6HCga
- Matt Stopera (@mattstopera) February 5, 2015
The Apple employee explained that most stolen iPhones end up in China and that the reason Stopera could see all these crazy photos was because Stopera's current phone and his stolen phone were still sharing the same iCloud account.
Stopera immediately deleted everything on his phone and the Apple Genius told him that his former phone would be deactivated. Stopera's long-distance photo pal would no longer have access to his account.
Chris Ritter for BuzzFeed
"To be honest, I was kind of upset about the whole thing," he wrote last week on BuzzFeed. "I had already parted ways with my phone and didn't expect to get it back. I kind of liked getting his picture updates and as long as he couldn't access my info, I was OK with it."
He resolved to put the whole episode behind him and move on with his life.
Going wild on Weibo
The next morning, he awoke to a swarm of tweets. A famous Weibo user in China had cross-posted his BuzzFeed post to the Chinese social networking site and thousands of Weibo users were determined to track this "Orange Man" down.
"People were saying how romantic the story was. They said it was like a fairy tale and perfect for the Chinese Spring Festival," Stopera says.
@mattstopera ur story is very famous in China now,it has been reposted for more than 10000 times on weibo(Chinese Twitter) in one hour?
- tmacshadow (@tmacshadow) February 19, 2015
By that point the story had blown up and millions were following along to see if/when the pair would meet.
A representative from Weibo reached out to Stopera and aked him to join the platform. The company helped set up his account, gave him a verified badge, and within minutes he had millions of followers.
"Google translates everything for web pages now already, so communicating is easy," Stopera told us "but it's all a little broken. A lot of people are also speaking English to me."
"Brother Orange" also set up a Weibo account and the two began publicly communicating as millions watched on in anticipation.
People all across China have been messaging Stopera, begging him to visit their country and reunite with "Brother Orange."
@mattstopera hi Matt !!!Bro Orange is reading your message now, although it's hard for him to understand English!!???? pic.twitter.com/XidcLXKwLO
- Eileen Huang (@EileenHuang0804) February 22, 2015
"I feel like a real-life Alex from Target, it's insanity!" he told us. Chinese users have also begun signing up for US social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter (technically banned in the country), just to communicate with him.
After a lot of back and forth Stopera and Brother Orange have made plans to meet on March 18th in in Meizhou, China.
Stopera has booked his travel and the two plan to share a meal prepared by Brother Orange at his family's restaurant.
"It's just been so fun to be able to talk with people on the other side of the world with a completely different country with a completely different internet culture, and share pictures and stuff," he says.
Though, juggling time zones has been a challenge and Stopera has been pulling some late nights. "My followers are literally on the other side of the world, so whenever I post during the day they yell at me," he says. "They're like, 'it's 2:00am here!', then they post tons of emojis. I post lots of emojis back."
Overall the experience has been positive. As many Weibo users have said, it's such a crazy and unlikely story. "All the technology involved, and the cloud, and no one knows how the cloud works I'm like how the hell is this even happening!?" Stopera says. "I can't wait to meet this guy."
"Chinese people have been giving me advice on how to act when I meet Brother Orange, I'm going to bring a gift to his house but I have no idea what that will be."
"The only way I would leave my job is if I became a Chinese pop star," Stopera says.
He is certainly on his way.
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