My Quest to Defy the ‘Bad Asian Driver’ Stereotype
I used to joke about my mom’s terrible driving with my friends
“Mom, you’re not supposed to stop when you’re merging on the highway!” I yell.
It takes me until I’m 14 or 15 to realize how terribly dangerous stopping before merging truly is. However, somehow we have always ended up all right. She accelerates from zero miles per hour to 60 miles per hour within a two-second span, so we’re always safe, but cars behind us honk like crazy.
Stopping before merging is one of several driving habits that would qualify my mother as a terrible driver. In the dark, she always keeps her brights on. When I ask her to turn the brights off when passing another car on a dark road, she insists that she’s right and I’m wrong. She also does not keep constant pressure on the accelerator, making every ride feel jerky, and she brakes very hard.
I have learned at 24 not to argue whenever I’m in the car with her. However, I’ll always insist on driving myself because I know how annoying backseat drivers can be, and it helps because she doesn’t enjoy driving in the first place. I will always appreciate how my mom dropped everything in the past to drive me somewhere. When I was growing up, she made extreme sacrifices to make sure I could participate in extracurricular…
