داستان انگلیسی رابطه ی احساسی بین المللی

ACTIVE LISTENING MAIN STORY

INTERNATIONAL BROMANCE

Sometimes in life, a bad thing can actually be a blessing in disguise. No one knows this better than Matt Stopera. When his iPhone was stolen from a bar, he had no way of knowing that this was the beginning of a story that would make him famous around the world.

On a chilly winter evening in February of 2014, Matt Stopera pours his second glass of Pinot Noir. He sits on a stool in his favorite bar in the East Village of New York City. It’s happy hour, and he’s chatting with some of the regulars as they filter in from their long day of work. Like Matt, most of them are young professionals, looking to hang out and network with one another. As always Matt is multitasking: juggling text messages on his iPhone while following the Knicks game on TV, and sharing some laughter with the other patrons. After several hours of this - and another bottle of wine - he goes to pay his tab and realizes that his iPhone has vanished. Matt borrows a friend’s phone, calls his own number and it goes straight to voicemail: the international sign of death for stolen phones. A wily thief swiped it from the bar. “That phone’s gone for good,” thinks Matt.

About a year later, Matt’s sitting on the couch at home with some friends and looking at the photos on his new iPhone. That’s when he sees a bunch of pictures he didn’t take, mostly selfies of an Asian man standing in front of an orange tree. He feels a mixture of astonishment and mystery, wondering who the man is and how those photos could have suddenly appeared on his new phone.

For the next month, fresh photos from the mysterious man come in daily. Some are of fireworks, others are of people, random street scenes, and more orange trees. Eventually, Matt realizes what is happening: his stolen iPhone has ended up in China, and the man taking pictures with it is its new owner. And the reason those pictures are showing up on Matt’s new iPhone is because his old phone was still connected to his iCloud account, which hadn’t changed. So to solve the problem once and for all, Matt simply logs into his iCloud and deletes the old phone from his account. Dead as a doornail. Or so he thinks…

Later that week, Matt posts an account of what happened to him on the website of his employer, Buzzfeed, thinking that readers of the website would find it amusing. Little did he know that his short article would start a chain of life-changing events for both him and the mysterious Chinese man in possession of Matt’s stolen iPhone.

You see, his post on Buzzfeed got translated into Chinese by a reader and then shared on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. The story immediately went viral, with 20 million views in the first 24 hours.

Within days, Matt was famous in China. Searches for ‘mattstopera’ hit number one on Weibo, and thousands of Chinese people began searching for the mysterious man with Matt’s iPhone. Matt then created his own Weibo account, and within one day had over 50,000 followers. People wanted Matt to teach them English. Matt posted videos and photos of himself. They nicknamed him ‘Doubi’, which is kind of like ‘Mr. Bean’ in Chinese. Within a week, he had over 100,000 followers. Matt had hit the big time in China overnight. He was famous.

It didn’t take long for the Chinese netizens to hunt down the mystery man with Matt’s iPhone. It turns out he was a 30-year-old restaurant owner from a city called Meizhou in southern China. They nicknamed him ‘Brother Orange’, as ‘brother’ is a term of respect in Chinese culture, while ‘Orange’ comes from the original selfies he posted.

They put Matt and Brother Orange in touch with each other, so both men started messaging back and forth on Weibo each day. Brother Orange eventually invited Matt to come visit him in China.

Matt accepted. The Chinese internet watched closely. Some fans actually wanted the two men to fall in love with one another. Could this story possibly get any stranger?

On the long flight to China, a sleeping Matt was awakened by a tap on the shoulder. It was a young Chinese woman. She handed him a handwritten letter and disappeared to the back of the plane.

She wrote that she was a fan, and wanted to become his friend. She said she was waiting for him at the back of the plane. She signed the letter, “Your Chinese fan”.

When Matt gets off the plane in Weizhou, he’s mobbed by photographers and fans. In the midst of all the flash bulbs and screams of delight, he sees Brother Orange, waiting for him with a big smile and a large bouquet of flowers. They both get rushed into a waiting car with Brother Orange’s face on it. Inside, Brother Orange returns Matt’s old iPhone to him. Matt recognizes the small dent in the side that he made one time when he dropped it over a year ago.

Matt doesn’t speak Chinese, nor does Brother Orange speak English, so both men communicate through an interpreter. The first topic of conversation was - you guessed it - the iPhone. Matt learns that his iPhone was shipped from New York to Hong Kong, where it soon ended up in a large secondhand cell phone market in Shenzhen, just across the border in southern China. It is there where Brother Orange’s nephew bought the iPhone as a gift for his uncle. And although Brother Orange received the phone in August, it wasn’t until January of 2015 that the photos began showing up on Matt’s new phone. Also, photos Matt had been taking on his new iPhone were showing up on Brother Orange’s phone. He just kept deleting them, not knowing how to stop them.

The days that followed were surreal. Both men were treated like celebrities. Everywhere they went, they were followed by fans, reporters, and cameras. They visited Brother Orange’s restaurant where Matt got to meet his new friend’s family. They even took selfies in front of the exact same orange tree from the mysterious photos that originally appeared on Matt’s iPhone. And with TV cameras rolling, they also planted a ceremonial orange tree together, symbolizing Chinese-American friendship.

They then proceeded to visit a famous soccer player’s house, chiseled a stone goat, and took a mud bath together – all in front of the cameras of course. Matt even goofed around by wearing a white wedding veil for one photo shoot, and a traditional dress of a Chinese girl for another. Matt was even asked to do brush calligraphy for the cameras, an activity usually associated with dignitaries. Along the way, they signed autographs, posed for photos, attended a major press conference, and even endorsed products that were cleverly placed nearby. Their last day together was spent away from the cameras, with the two sharing personal time together as friends.

It was a true international bromance and the Chinese internet ate it up.

Their last stop on their Chinese tour was the Weibo headquarters in Beijing, where they got to meet the Weibo team for a final send-off.

What started out as a routine iPhone theft in New York City, ended up changing the lives of two average young men in drastic ways. In the end, the story on Weibo had over 70 million views, and now both men are minor celebrities in China. They’ve even been recently featured on American TV channels CNN, CBS, and most recently the popular talk show ‘Ellen’.

But it’s the massive interest in the story that’s revealing. In spite of cultural and linguistic differences, not to mention a complicated political climate, the people of both the USA and China yearned to see two unlikely men become close friends. Ten years ago, something like this never could have happened. In fact, Twitter is even banned in China, so the likelihood of this happening was rare.

The power of the internet not only changed the lives of two ordinary men, but it focused the attention of millions of people in the US and China on this unlikely friendship. Why has this story of a petty crime that sparked an international friendship gone viral? Well, we all love stories full of irony and serendipity, but perhaps that’s not all. In spite of our outward differences, perhaps we all inwardly desire to come together and experience friendship and brotherhood. Even if it’s a goofy bromance made in Weibo.