The fact that she managed to get another 20 buyers to buy the iPhones should not surprise many as China is known as an Apple-crazed country and is currently the top iPhone market outside of United States for Apple. This 20 iPhone story was first shared through a blog post on Chinese platform Tian Ya Yi Du, where a user going by the name Proud Qiaoba wrote about her friends’ heroics. Proud Qiaoba shared this astounding tale about her friend Xiaoli, who sold the 20 iPhone 7s for a total 120,000 Chinese yuan (about $18,000) to a tech resale website, Hui Shou Bao. Xiaoli then used this money to pay for the down payment for her new home in the countryside. The blog post went viral on the Chinese social networking website Weibo. In the post, Proud Qiaoba wrote that Xiaoli was a poor daughter of a migrant worker and a housewife. “Her parents are getting old and she might be under a lot of pressure hoping to buy them a house… But it’s still unbelievable that she could use this method!” The news made Xiaoli a talking point in China as well as at her workplace when she called a few friends from work over to show them the house and told them the story of how she got the money to pay the deposit. Proud Qiaoba wrote in the post, “Everyone in the office is talking about this now. Who knows what her boyfriends think now this news has become public.” A Weibo hashtag with Chinese equivalent of “20 mobiles for a house” went viral with over 13 million tweets, with many women expressing admiration for Xiaoli’s 20 iPhone romance. According to the BBC, one Weibo user posted, “I can’t even find one boyfriend. She can actually find 20 boyfriends at the same time and even get them to buy her an iPhone 7. Just want to ask her to teach me such skills.” Some others weren’t so friendly in their assessment of Xiaoli’s endeavor, calling her “shameful.” But evidently this kind of publicity has affected Xiaoli. When BBC contacted her employers to get in touch with her, they were told, “Her day-to-day life has been affected (from the local media attention) and she doesn’t want the media to continue covering this story, so she has turned down your interview request.” Many admired Xiaoli’s resourcefulness in buying a new house but the problem lies in finding 20 boyfriends who would want to gift you an iPhone 7!
