Her Indoors has got the strange idea that these avatars are taking the piss out of Chinese people, and so refuses to help me here.
Yowtch!
Geez, I hope you can get her past that notion, because...we're not.
(Well, not usually, anyway. But we take the piss out of EVERYONE sooner or later 'round here.
)
Tell her sometimes the English usage in China is so bad we have to laugh at it...but this is a good-natured foreign-language thing happening worldwide, not really aimed at the Chinese. We just happen to nearly all live or have lived in China, so it's the place we're interested in.
Sometimes the real butt of the jokes is the laowai, not the Chinese.
You can tell her that said laowai quite often don't seem to pick up on this fact.
And...sometimes, when you visit another country that requires such a vast cultural shift, you quite often see things you have absolutely no hope of understanding. After a while, developing lunatic theories about what those things might mean becomes sort of a fun little game you play. This isn't being insulting, it's coming to terms with our own foreignness.
Hope those help.