Casual Conversation

It's also probably made-up.

It was very difficult to navigate and no one would help her.

At airports and train stations in any major city in China, which includes any city that has an international airport, there is English signage everywhere. There are also information booths everywhere staffed by multilingual people. Further, even in the minor cities and such (if she somehow managed to wind up in a small city like, say, Jiujiang), white people have a common tactic they use: stand looking helpless and wait (it's rarely over ten minutes) for someone to work up the courage to try their "very bad" (the words they will use) English on them and to help them.

Given that she arrived from the USA she started in a major city. Chengdu is another major city. I'm calling a lie on this unless she did this in, like, the 1980s. (That era of China was definitely a different world from today.)

The gym she was working for had banned weights in their gym, weights!

I'm in my 24th year here. I've lived in three cities and I've visited dozens more. I have never, not even once, seen a gym that didn't have weights. Indeed most of the time, to my frustration, all they have are weights and a too-small mat for other exercises.

Again, I'm calling this made-up.

Where she stayed was a more safe area (where her friend lived).

LMFAO! The "safest" areas of New York City are far more dangerous than the most dangerous portions of the worst cities in China! Even in a city as tame as Ottawa (that's in Canada for any Americans reading) there were neighbourhoods I didn't feel comfortable walking through in the daytime and would not set foot in at night.

In China, by comparison, I cheerfully walked down the darkest of alleys at night even in economically depressed small cities like Huangshi. (You wouldn't know of it. Just like you'd never heard of Wuhan before 2020.)

Anybody American (of all people!) thinking that parts of China are "dangerous" is incredibly obtuse.

They took her out to dinner once, and that was it, they left her to fend on her own.

Do you really want literally every American immigrant (or even non-white visitor, or Hell, even your own citizens!) in history to face you with her oh-so-privileged attitude here? Really? You might want a brief refresher.

The inability of Americans to look at how they treat others all while whining how they're treated is truly stunning sometimes.

Finally on her way back, she had her final surprise. My wife is generally a nervous flyer, and this event put her off from flying for a bit. On her plane back (she can’t remember what company) while they were passing over Japan, they hit the most turbulence she had ever been on. The plan started to violently shake and lose control, the oxygen masks deployed and everyone started crying.

And this here seals the deal. The "trauma" wasn't even caused by the Chinese or China. It was caused by air.

So here's my take from the story (a take informed by almost a quarter of a century of watching Americans in China):

A whiny, middle-class white American woman wasn't waited on hand and foot by the Chinese. Combined with the fact that she likely already had bigoted expectations of China led her to melt down into an even whinier pool of self-pity, interpreted everything around her in the most negative light possible, then confabulated even worse things, and finally got "traumatized" by the AIR (literally). And blames that on China too. (And likely blames sunspots on China as well.)

If she went to China in the '80s or maybe even the '90s her experiences with people staring at her and laughing might be true (though it's odd that someone who at the beginning of the story didn't speak a word of Mandarin somehow knew what people were calling her), though she likely misinterpreted the laughter and its intent. (Laughter and its usage varies across culture, but Americans are not exactly known for understanding that other cultures even exist not to mention subtle details like this.)

Again maybe in the '80s or '90s her observations of corrugated roofs next to palaces may be legit (although grossly exaggerated), but if this happened at any point in the '00s onward she's just flatly lying. Chengdu today is a far more modern and good-looking city than any American city, including New York. (Perhaps especially New York since that whole thing of slums interspersed with palaces is something I saw in NYC...)

I won't comment on being paid to spy on other gyms. I lack any experience with how gyms operate (though I might point out that literally anybody can just walk into a gym, pay a visitor's fee plus an instructor's fee, and get to see the operations of a gym directly in first person). That part could be true; there's shady businesses everywhere (yes, including the USA) who do dumb things. That part gets dumped into the "I don't know" pile along with a few other minor details mentioned above.

But most of that story? Reeks to high heaven.