A social media post in China reminiscing over the 2008 Beijing Olympics has sparked a worldwide search for the foreign owner of a lost memory card full of images of the man.
According to the original post on Xiaohongshu, or Little Red Book, a Chinese social networking and ecommerce platform, the poster, Luo Xia, accidentally took the SD card in an Internet cafe in Beijing where he went to watch the Olympic Games alone in 2008.
“I took someone else’s SD card by mistake while uploading images in an Internet cafe,” Luo wrote. “I only found out it belonged to a foreigner when I came home; I think he probably had forgotten about his experience in Beijing in 2008.”
According to one of the photos posted by Luo on July 13, the foreigner was wearing a T-shirt with the Chinese character “dragon” printed on the front.
The hashtag: “I got an SD card that belonged to a foreigner at the 2008 Beijing Olympics”, has received over 190 million views on Weibo and many users have posted the search information on overseas social media platforms.
Luo said that his original intention was to share his memories of the time online after finding the photos while sorting through old photographs.
“I haven’t organised my old images in years, and I’ve had four computers since,” Luo told the Global Times.
“I wasn’t expecting to see the old photos again. And it was way beyond my expectations that the photos I shared online would spark people’s interest in finding the stranger.”
Luo, who was impressed by people’s eagerness to find the foreigner, said he would be happy to return the card to its rightful owner.
“Human memory requires clues to sustain it,” Luo explained. “When you see a photo, you can briefly recollect the past, and when the photo is gone, that memory may also be gone.”
Luo said that if he is able to find the foreigner, he will not only send him the images, but may even create a short video to document the experience.
“I’d like to ask the foreigner who lost his SD card what the memories in China meant to him and if he wants to come back to visit,” Luo said. – South China Morning Post