Hi Ian,
Yes,I suspect that if you had filled that position you might well have lost your temper with one or two of your fellow foreign teachers.
I can recall one of them in my time there swearing blind that honest was pronounced without the h silent in the States.But the dictionary doesn't confirm his statement,and I later discovered that that young man wasn't even an American!Not being too easygoing,I tried to correct him,resulting in a quarrel about it.
Also,you might have been dragged into petty disputes between Chinese teaching assistants and their foreign teachers.Not easy to be a kind of go-between between the Chinese culture,and the diverse Western,Caribbean,and African cultures of the foreign teachers there.
But what has been posted previously by a colleage of yours or two makes me think that your build would have intimidated the potential troublemakers amongst the foreign teachers,significantly reducing the problems there,and,more importantly improving the quality of the teaching.