One young lady assured me: "We spoke to our head Chinese teacher, he told us that this was normal behavior for Western teachers."

Yeah, and like some chinese young tart or chinese head teacher would know 4/5ths of sod all about the West or Westerners.

Most are not interested in anything foreign at all, so how the hell would they know what is "normal behavior" for Western Teachers. Also it is better not to stereotype, there are some Western Teachers who are far more qualified than the chinese english teachers, some of whom many even have fake degrees, but when you are in a country where a major airline has FAKE airline pilots who submitted FAKE resumes, then nothing surprises me.