This article helped me understand difficult students:

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/the-hardest-students-to-teach/print/

You have not had difficult students until you teach in a foreign country. Usually, foreign students are much more respectful than American students. However, cultural differences make for challenges.

In my first week of teaching Speech Communication to Chinese students, I realized that the majority of them were not going to be as responsive as I needed them to be. In each of two classes, one or two students answered all the questions. One reason is that those students who responded had a better command of the English language. The second reason is that they were more outgoing than their fellow students.

One professor informed me that Chinese students do not want to be embarrassed in front of their peers. That helped me to understand them better. But I thought because they would be chatting away with each other as they entered the class that they would be talking to me much more. NOT. I had to drag answers out of them, making my job more difficult than it should have been.