jfrankli512

She passed her interview without any issues.
She conducted it in Chinese, and they did ask us how we communicate, and she told them I speak Chinese (which is true).
She had prepared a mountain of chat logs to prove this, but they didn't ask to look at them.
Overall, it was a very easy interview.

Just to answer my own question:
I'm almost certain (99% sure) that asking a question to the embassy and getting a response changes that update date...
Three weeks and no change, but I ask for an update each week, and each time they respond my status update date changes...
Wish I could just go and hibernate for a while until this process is done.

You can look at my recent posts to get an idea of the paper process...
My case happened earlier this year and went from 1/6 case complete to 3/7 P4 receipt, so expect about 2 months of waiting...
The most frustrating part is that there's no indication of how much longer you have to wait.
My DHL status tracker showed it clearing chinese customs on 1/23, but that didn't correlate at all with the actual results.
I e-mailed the Guangzhou embassy every week for an update, but they had the same response every week and wouldn't provide an ETA.
The best think you can do is monitor the CEAC Status website for the "case updated" date. Whenever that actually changes, that's when the consulate actually has your file and has started working on it, so you can expect the P4 e-mail within a couple days. Note that if you e-mail the embassy, that "case updated" date gets updated when they respond to you, so it's almost better to just sit and start at the status screen instead of trying to push them to find out where things are at.