I’d love to hear directly from your fiance. Here’s some of the history behind Chinese Fire Drill since that seems to be the major sticking one. Take care, Dmae

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_fire_drill

Origins

The term is alleged to have originated in the early 1900s, when a ship manned by British officers and a Chinese crew practiced a fire drill in the engine room. The bucket brigade drew water from the starboard side, took it to the engine room, and threw it onto the fire. A separate crew hauled the accumulated water to the main deck and heaved the water over the port side. The drill went according to plan until the orders became confused in translation. The bucket brigade began to draw the water from the starboard side, run over to the port side and then throw the water overboard, bypassing the engine room completely.[3]

Around the time of World War I, British English’s adjective Chinese had a slang meaning of “confused, disorganized, or difficult to understand.” Other examples include:

“Chinese puzzle,” a puzzle with no or a hard-to-fathom solution[4]
“Chinese whispers,” also known as “Telephone,” a children’s game in which a straightforward statement is shared through a line of players one player at a time until it reaches the end, often having been comically transformed along the way into a completely different statement.

“Chinese auction,” a “penny social”

“Chinese national anthem,” an explosion

“Chinese landing,” a clumsy landing

“Chinese cigarette,” a bent, smashed, or slightly torn cigarette.

“Chinese ace,” an inept pilot, derived from the term One Wing Low (which sounds like a Chinese name), an aeronautical technique[4][

It’s also been my experience that half-asians can get shit from the asian side. For instance one of my close friends was half-japanese and he used to tell me about all sorts of crap he got in Japan for not being fully Japanese. I was only speaking about one very narrow group and even there I didn’t mean to deny that there was ever any issues.

My point was that it’s very very easy to start seeing the world through one particular lens and that racial prejudice is just one way that can happen. It’s important that we distingush true racism that still exists from a half-asian lady getting offended that someone uses the term “Chinese Fire Drill” and the importance of this is exactly the fact that real racism does still exist and ought not to be equated with this trivial crap.