Dealing with the international students isn't that bad. You just have to remember to talk slowly and clearly because even though it may seem like they are fluent, they most definitely are not. Another BIG BIG thing you have to understand about Chinese people is that they don't respond to ribbing the same way Americans do. Screaming and yelling and being harsh will make an American wake up and be more alert, but a Chinese person will just shut down. There was a video making the rounds a few months ago that was an audio clip of an instructor absolutely screaming at the top of his lungs at his Asian student because he wouldn't turn off the heater or something. The more he screamed, the more withdrawn from the situation the student got. That totally jives with my experiences with Asians. I had one student that would fly like a champ until I got snappy with him, which would cause him to LITERALLY stop flying the plane. I remember once I snapped at him because he didn't do the before landing checklist after the FAF, and he just continued ahead without descending. We crossed the MAP at the FAF altitude. I kid you not. This was a student who had been doing instrument trainiong for at least 2 months and was just a few weeks away from his checkride.

The planes are sort of well maintained. I've never noticed anything blatant, but its very common to have to cancel a night flight because there are no instrument lights, or the plane has been dispatched to you when its 10 hours past it's 100 hour inspection.

As far as MEI training, when I was there, they told instructors they could do their MEI there at cost basically, which came out to $140 an hour. Most peopel just took the planes, flew them and never paid anything. The place was so disorganized, you could get away with crap like that. A bunch of people got their tailwheel endorsement for free that way too.