Matt Stopera has become the "Chinese Alex from Target" facebook.com/mattstopera
Matt Stopera noticed something was wrong with his phone in January.
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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.
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 the stolen one were still sharing the same iCloud account.
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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.
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"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.
Within 24 hours Weibo users had found where the photos were taken (Guangdong, China), and had hunted the man down. "Orange Man’s nephew heard about the story and posted pictures of my phone and pictures of his uncle on Weibo," Stopera explains.
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.
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"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."
Stopera has millions of followers on Weibo, the Chinese social media network Weibo
"Brother Orange" also set up a Weibo account and the two began publicly communicating as millions watched on in anticipation.
Stopera's name skyrocketed to the top of Weibo's trending topics and so far over 60 million people have read his story.
People all across China have been messaging Stopera, begging him to visit their country and reunite with "Brother Orange."
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When Stopera posts on Weibo his posts immediatley receive thousands of comments. "I post things like, 'what should I eat for lunch?' and everyone weighs in," says Stopera. "This week I posted pictures outside in the Bryant Park fountain this week saying, 'Ohh it's so cold here, what's it like where you are?' and tons of people were writing back and sharing photos of themselves."
"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.
BuzzFeed
"A lot of people sign up and are like, 'I have no friends on Facebook, can you be my first friend?' and I'm like, 'sure!' and same with Twitter," Stopera says. "People say, 'oh I just signed up for this so I could say hi to you.'"
Millions of Chinese people are begging Stopera to visit their country BuzzFeed
After a lot of back and forth Stopera and Brother Orange have made plans to meet on March 18th in in Meizhou, China.
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Stopera has booked his travel and the two plan to share a meal prepared by Brother Orange at his family's restaurant.
"I think he still has my phone, which is crazy," Stopera says, though he adds that he has no plans to ask for it back. "Honestly, I don't care. Losing that phone was totally worth it."
"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.
BuzzFeed
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."
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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."
Stopera's long-distance photo pal is known as Brother Orange Matt Stopera
He plans to document his trip heavily on social media. You can follow Stopera on Twitter or Instagram for updates and he plans to produce a video about the trip as well.
"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."
In the meantime, Stopera has no plans to leave his day job at BuzzFeed to capitalize on his social media fame.
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"The only way I would leave my job is if I became a Chinese pop star," Stopera says.