the things i don’t care about (and some that i do).

We saw a pretty horrible news story while we were eating dinner last night. A seven year old boy had been riding shotgun without a seatbelt, while eating a piece of fried chicken. There was a head-on collision, followed closely by the deployment of the car’s airbags. The force of the airbag forced the fried chicken bone into the throat of the boy, who died of multiple injuries and bloodloss shortly thereafter. It’s a terrible story, I know, but it was all I could think about as our seven-person-plus-luggage full van drove down the winding roads of Jade Mountain national park, taking corners too fast and following the car too closely.

Learning to drive in the ‘burbs of Alaska, the Four Second Rule (not to be confused with the Five Second Rule) was my dad’s mantra. As the van hurtled down the mountain road, it was neither the Four, nor the more lenient Two Second Rule. It was more like the “Wuh” Second rule, which is when you only have the time to say the “Wuh” in “One” before the car ahead of you hits the brakes, and you are ejected through the windshield, off of a cliff, and into the scenic Jade Mountain National Park landscape. Either that, or–should I be ejected in a more left-ward trajectory–turned into hamburger on a stone cliff-face. And make no mistakes about it, I would most definitely been ejected, for there was a clear flightpath from my middle-row center seat, but also because there were no seatbelts. Actually, there were seat belts, just nothing to buckle them into. When I first heard the above tv news story, my first thought turned to “Why would anyone let a kid ride in the front seat without a seatbelt?” but then, as I was becoming more and more nauseus, I laid less blame on the driver of the car, and decided that the problem was bigger than one child and one collision. It was something bigger, queasier, and all together societal in nature.

You see, this is not the first time my heart (and stomach fluids) has leapt into my mouth in a car in Taiwan. One of the last cabs I was in nearly creamed a motor scooter driver while performing an illegal U-turn on red, while on a separate occasion I could have sworn that the cabby was actively attempting to run all other motorized vehicles off of the street all while talking on his cell and honking his horn at, well, everyone. Hell, just today I saw a car exit the freeway into a lane of oncoming traffic. What was amazing about that, was that in order to do this the driver had to miss turning into the first four lanes of traffic going the right direction, then pass a rather large, very clearly marked NO ENTRY traffic island before turning into our lane.

My Godmother, for instance, likes to put on her sunglasses when she drives at night. No biggie in Taiwan. And it seems to be even less of a problem when she mistakes the shoulder of the road as a traffic lane that no one seems to be using. My uncle, meanwhile, enjoys running stop signs, illegal turns, and flipping the bitch whenever he feels like it, all set to an operatic rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I don’t think the turn signal has ever come into play. So I asked a family friend about the driving here and she just laughed and told me about her sister’s driver in Mumbai, who claimed to be a good driver because he’d been a professional driver for five years and only killed two people with his car. Good grief.

So why are Asians the world’s worst drivers? I’m Chinese myself, so I don’t enjoy the stereotype any more than anyone else, but so far I can’t disagree. I almost never feel as terrified in a moving vehicle in the States as I do here–unless my Asian friends are driving. I wish I had the money and resources to figure out the cause of all this needless lane-changing and tailgating. Then I could solve this problem and end this racial pigeonholing once and for all. But I don’t have that kind of time and money, and with the money I do have, I think I’ll just take the subway, thank you.