A curious tale of how an unsuspecting American became one of the most popular figures on China’s social media
Matt Stopera and Brother Orange Image: Buzzfeed/Qingqing Chen |
Back in 2014, Matt Stopera, a staff member at the popular Buzzfeed.com site, had his phone stolen outside a bar in New York.
Though an unfortunate incident it was certainly not an uncommon one, and certainly not one anyone could have predicted would lead to Stopera achieving celebrity status half way around the world.
Stopera’s stolen iPhone was carted to Shenzhen, were it was sold on illegally. However, the thieves unwittingly forgot to turn off the iCloud function that uploads users’ pictures online.
About a year after the event Stopera began to see pictures of a man picking oranges on his computer, and made a post entitled “Who is this man and why are his pictures showing up on my phone?” on Buzzfeed.com.
China’s “human flesh search engine” – a term used to describe mass searching by the nation’s netizens – did the rest as people latched on to the curious question of the orange picker’s identity. Within days Stopera had become the hottest trending topic on Weibo and had found “Brother Orange”, the man in the pictures.
After some time liaising, Stopera flew to China to meet him and was quickly mobbed by hoardes of papparazi before meeting Li Hongjun, the man in the photos.
The following days transformed Stopera into a national celebrity, and he received wide-spread mainstream media coverage, was chaperoned around the country, bathed in mud, attended multiple press conferences, dined at lavish restaurants, unwittingly endorsed numerous alcoholic beverages and, eventually, went back to see the original orange tree that started the bizarre chain of events.
Stopera was also guest of honour at the Weibo headquarters. Weibo is China’s largest microblogging service and played a large part in spreading news of the story.
After translation into Chinese, the tale of Matt Stopera and Brother Orange has been seen by over 30m people on Weibo and transformed them both into household names in China. Li is enjoying his new found fame touring the country and giving interviews with local and national media, as well as making a guest appearance on a cooking show (perhaps he made marmalade?)
Stopera did not go home empty handed either as he was able to retrieve the infamous iPhone that started the bizarre series of events.
The journey, which is now being made into a documentary, is an example of how quickly a viral video, picture, or post can become national news.