ADD

Speaking of the crazies out on Black Friday, over the weekend we did go out to the local Japanese supermarket for some sushi and ramen.  Now there's something about Asian drivers that seems to go out of control at places like Asian grocery stores, Asian restaurants, etc.  Basically, if you get too many Asian drivers in close proximity to each other, you're asking for trouble.  I call it ADD or Asian Driving Disorder.

One symptom of ADD is that the parking spaces and streets near Asian areas is are jam packed at all times of the day.  This makes drivers throw all the usual rules of the road out the window---you don't get anywhere by being polite.  Instead, cars race through the parking lots trying to grab the first space they see, cutting off people, swerving in front of pedestrians, and generally it becomes a survival of the fittest competition.  I wonder if the most of these people learned to drive in the free for all streets of Asia before coming to the US, where these repressed instincts flare up due to the high concentration of fellow Asian people.  Without fail, every time we go to the local Asian Food Market, we almost die.  This time, we ended up almost getting hit by a couple of cars just walking to the door and we saw two cars back into each other since neither driver was paying any attention.  This was true in California and it's true in New Jersey and New York as well.

Anyway, it doesn't look like the problem is likely to go away.  There was a recent Wall Street Journal artcle that cited statistics that Asian Americans in New Jersey had a lifespan of 91.8 years compared to 79.7 years for all other residents and even higher than the 87.3 years for Asian Americans living in the rest of the country.  I guess it must be something in the water.  The article does suggest that the situation may be autocatalytic---that as more Asian Americans get together, more and more join them.  It looks like the driving craziness won't stop.