Between 15 and 50 million died in the Great Leap Forward famine
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/great-leap-forward-famine
It is possible that my Chinese friend did not know about the people who starved to death in the Great Leap Forward and that was why she found my story so funny.
We went to a WWII museum together. I ended up having to explain to her the reason we had to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. Apparently, she had never learned much about WWII when she was growing up in China.
What seemed odd to me was that she complained that the US was not as advanced as China. Her brother was a banker in Beijing, and quite wealthy. I never asked her why she decided to live in the US when she considered China so much more advanced.