Let's condense into one thread here...
A factory reset won't hurt the unlock. That's on a much deeper level than user data. As for the Chinese characters, the phone most likely has a Chinese radio (and other components?) flashed so that it can be unlocked from US bands. That most likely explains the characters. You can probably flash an English ROM after rooting it, which should modify the /system partition with English characters. If you still have issues, you can flash a US cellular radio and just use it as a GPS and not phone, while still being able to return it to a foreign network with a different radio. This may hurt SIM unlock though.
