Story of iPhone lost in US goes viral in China
Print Edition
THE story of a man from New York City who had his iPhone stolen in January 2014 has become a hit on China’s social media.
According to a story he published on Buzzfeed.com, Matt Stopera lost his phone in a bar in the city’s East Village.
Some time after replacing it he noticed in his iCloud account hundreds of pictures of a Chinese man posing in front of orange trees and in other situations.
“I was going through my photos and I was like, ‘Oh my God, who is this person?’” Stopera said.
There were dozens of selfies in front of orange trees, storefronts, menus, fireworks, buildings, and other odd pictures.
Stopera knew he had not taken the images and was at first perplexed as to what they were doing in his account. Despite the puzzlement he enjoyed following the other person’s “life” through the photos.
Some time later, a friend told Stopera that the mystery man in the images was probably the new “owner” of the phone, and had logged in — and uploaded images to — the American’s iCloud account unwittingly.
Stopera then went to an Apple Store, where an assistant deleted all of the “strange” images from his iCloud account and made it inaccessible from his old phone.
But after Stopera wrote about his experience on Buzzfeed, someone translated his story into Chinese and uploaded it to Weibo, where it became a huge hit.
Soon after, Weibo users located “Brother Orange,” who is a man from Meizhou in south China’s Guangdong Province.
The two men also got in touch and Brother Orange — who claimed he was given the stolen phone by a relative — invited Stopera to visit him in China.
On Saturday, Stopera opened a Weibo account and made his first post.
“Hello everyone! Thank you so much for helping me find my phone and Bro Orange! This has been such a great journey and only possible because of all of you! It’s a dream of mine to visit China and hopefully I will get to meet Bro Orange and see your country!” he wrote.
Stopera’s Weibo post was “liked” by nearly 27,000 people and received more than 7,600 comments, with many people offering to be his guide if he ever decides to visit China.
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