How The Bad Asian Driver Stereotype Affected My Driving

“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 alright. 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.

The 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. In the dark, she always has the brights on. She also does not keep constant pressure on the accelerator, making every ride feel not very smooth, 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, and she made extreme sacrifices to make sure I could participate in cross country meets and make buses, so I would not constantly have to ask for favors.

I am not saying I’m a terrific driver. I am a Baltimore city driver and certainly more aggressive on the road than my mom (or your average driver). I have always realized my mom’s driving, which I played off with criticism and humor to my brother and friends, plays into a common stereotype. She is a Chinese woman in her 50s, and her driving plays very much into the bad Asian driver stereotype.

Of course, there are bad drivers of every race. I used to joke about my mom’s driving with my friends. I actually used to encourage them to make jokes about my mom’s driving as a teenager too (yeah, definitely not the nicest thing to do). One time, we were driving on icy New York roads towards a stop sign. She and I got into an argument about her driving, and she sped up the closer we got to a stop sign before coming to an abrupt stop. Two of my friends in the car, and we would reenact the scene to all of our friends later at school.

And regardless of race, bad driving is objectively bad driving. I’m a bad driver at times and I was a bad driver when I started, but in no way should anyone be stopping when they merge or having brights on when passing in the dark. My mother’s ability to always end up okay and get into only a couple of accidents during her time driving was always a miracle.

I now realize how immature I was, how easy it is for anyone to be a supercritical backseat driver and how complicit I was in a stereotype against my own race. I found humor in it, but it was not humor to lighten the situation. I’m not saying it was any kind of internalized racism or any other subconscious undercurrent, but like any teenager, I wanted to garner laughs and fit in. Cheap jabs at my own ethnicity seemed to be the way to do it, especially since I wanted to normalize conversations about race because my well-intentioned non-Asian friends always seemed to beat around the bush.

Urban Dictionary has an entry for “asian driver” that especially decries the “FOB female.” For those who don’t know, FOB is a term for “Fresh Off the Boat,” which refers to Asian immigrants. I have used it on more than one occasion. I have been in China and spent most of my time in Hengyang, a city in the southern part of the Hunan Province of China, as well as the nearby countryside. I feared for my life in taxis and cars in China than I ever did in America. On busy roads without traffic lights, aggression exceeds the worst I’ve ever seen in New York City during rush hour.

But the “Asians are bad drivers” stereotype is well enmeshed in our culture. Family Guy ran a clip on an Asian woman driver who swerves through traffic and ends up okay, but causes multiple accidents in doing so. For the record, I thought and still think the clip is hilarious and will watch it with my non-Asian friends on a late night. And in searching for the data, some suggest Asians, on average, are actually better drivers than people give us credit for. The Augusta Free Press reports on car insurance premiums for Asians being 10 percent less for the average U.S. driver.

Of course, correlation does not equal causation. Insurance premiums are often determined by zip code, and there could be confounding factors like many Asians living in wealthier communities.

Karma snuck up on me once I learned how to drive myself and entered a student driving program. You have to understand I never drove a car before I was 17. I thought driving in real life was just like driving in Grand Theft Auto, where you constantly ran red lights and drove 120 miles per hour and controlled the steering wheel with a joystick. Needless to say, driving in real life is absolutely nothing like driving in Grand Theft Auto.

But the first time I drove a car, I was in a student driving class. The first time I drove, an instructor had a brake in the passenger seat. I wondered “how hard could this be?”, only to realize it was really hard for me. I pressed down on the gas pedal, hard, and we all zoomed forward. I also never knew how hard to push on the brake and slammed it as hard as I could on numerous occasions. The two other student drivers in the back immediately put on their seat belts, but I will never forget that first drive. She had to use her brake several times. I couldn’t make left turns.

We stayed on local roads and I would have killed all of us if I went on the expressway that day. I was going 25 miles per hour on 45 mile per hour speed limit zones, and three other drivers were so impatient they illegally passed me on the left (I probably would have done the same thing).

The whole experience made me very, very flustered. I instantly felt pretty ashamed, not only of myself, but of all the times I was the backseat driver and super critical of my mom. My fellow student drivers, a white kid and Hispanic kid, were beyond supportive of my improvement throughout driver’s ed. We would normally take turns driving for 30 miunte spans and they would always comment on how much better I got since the first time we drove. I would do the same with them. Whenever I made a mistake or wasn’t perfect, I got flustered, which wasn’t great because no one is great as a student driver anyway. Eventually, I did pass my road test on my first try.

Every day that summer, my mom sat in the car while I practiced, while I insisted on practicing. Race was certainly not the only factor in the discussion. In fact, having such a terrible first driving experience led me to become a better driver. But I did have the “am I a bad driver because I’m Asian?” thought on more than one occasion. And there certainly was a part of me that wanted to defy the stereotype of the bad Asian driver.

Stereotypes have always wielded significant power in my life. I always wanted to prove the positive stereotypes of my race (being good in school and being good in math) while disproving the negative stereotypes. The bad driver stereotype certainly fell into the latter category, and it made it easier for me to get flustered whenever driving did not go well.

Stereotype threat is when negative stereotypes are confirmed, especially in regard to standardized tests. When psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson mainly focused on standardized testing: they found in experiments that Black college students perform worse than white college students when reminded, according to EdGlossary, that “their racial group tends to do poorly on such exams.” Stereotype threat also applies to other pernicious stereotypes like women and driving and Asians and driving, and the added layer of being an Asian man shields me from stereotypes more than being an Asian woman.

Some people will say I’m a good driver. It’s definitely not something I think about since I drive every day and just, well, drive. Baltimore is a city where the left lane can very suddenly turn into a turn lane with no warning whatsoever, and I navigate myself reasonably well in the city. I can parallel park reasonably well, as well as back into slanted parking spaces.

I spent about a year as an Uber and Lyft driver that was interesting, to say the least. “Good conversation” and “excellent service” are the two most common compliments on Uber, and “friendly driver” was the most common compliment on Lyft. “Good driving” was sometimes a compliment, but never the most common one.

I am proud to say I am not the best driver out there, but I am not a bad driver. I wanted for a long time to counter and defy the “Asians are bad drivers stereotype,” not in defiance of any white supremacist power structure or against capitalism or any high-in-the-clouds academic concept, but just to prove the stereotype wrong.

Photo by Adismara Putri Pradiri on Unsplash

Originally published on June 11, 2021 on Medium.

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