Immigrants’ Challenge : Learning the Ins and Outs of Driving

Muoi Tran was showing distinct signs of improvement in her second encounter with the automobile.

Her first lesson on the residential streets of Monterey Park had ended in failure. The flustered 44-year-old Vietnamese immigrant was unable to drive straight. She clawed at the steering wheel, but her car kept veering toward traffic in the opposite lane and then drifting back in the other direction, inches from cars parked along the curb.

An hour into her second try, with frequent corrections from her teacher, Tran settled into a wobbly approximation of forward motion. It was progress she would have to savor later. For the moment, she grasped the steering wheel with clenched fists, as if the sheer force of her grip could right the car’s course.

Husband Unable to Drive

She had lived a full life--growing to adulthood during the Vietnam War, spending months in a Cambodian refugee camp and starting anew in Monterey Park with her husband, Phuoc, and eight children--without once turning an ignition key. That was reserved for her salesman husband until attacks of pain in his arm made it impossible for him to maneuver the family station wagon.

“I think I will like to drive,” she said after prematurely slamming on the brakes at a deserted intersection. “But it makes me nervous.”

Driving, that deceptively simple feat of coordination and memorization, can pose an awkward adjustment for immigrants. Adults who have never driven must learn a whole new physical universe, prodding strange buttons and pedals while they move on alien terrain. And immigrants accustomed to driving in congested foreign cities sometimes have to shed roadway habits that could violate the law in their new country.

Car a Necessity

Nowhere are the benefits and strains of that transition more visible than in Southern California, where the car is all but essential for work and play. When they are ready to take to the road, immigrants often turn to their own to learn, creating a booming market for ethnic-oriented driving schools.

In Pasadena, Nisham Basmadjian, the founder of Driving Hye (the Armenian word for Armenian) School, admonishes Lebanese students who repeatedly glance up at their rear-view mirrors every few seconds. “In Beirut, you’re always worrying who’s behind you and what kind of guns they’re carrying,” he said. “Here, they need a full view of the road.”

Jose Vargas, the owner of Condor Driving School in Eagle Rock, tries to get students just in from Mexico City to cut down on their horn use. “They honk all day long,” he said. “They have loud air horns that play the first few notes from the ‘Godfather Theme’ or the march from ‘Bridge on the River Kwai.’ I have to tell them that in Los Angeles that kind of thing is against the law.”

Over time, there is no evidence to suggest that immigrants perform any differently than native-born drivers. But there is a minority whose adjustment to the region’s roads, laws and traffic patterns is long and tortured. Their confusion and reliance on old habits have sometimes led to conspicuous traffic disruptions, which have in turn spawned damaging racial stereotypes linking some ethnic groups with poor driving habits.

Police departments in several communities are responding by trying novel driver awareness programs to reach their immigrant populations. Though the programs are still in their infancy, they appear to be having some salutary impact.

‘Freedom and Privilege’

“There are two musts for any immigrant who comes to California--learning English and learning how to drive,” said Young Moon Kim, who capitalized on his own troubles passing the state’s driving test 18 years ago to build a successful driving school catering to Los Angeles’ Korean community. “A car means freedom and privilege. Until we can drive properly, we feel as if we don’t fit in.”

It is a message that immigrants hear within days of their arrival. In many immigration service centers, where newcomers line up for information on jobs and housing, counselors emphasize that ownership of a car can be crucial to success in new careers.

Chinese immigrants who come to the Chinatown Service Center are handed maps and schedules for the city’s bus system, then urged to buy cars as soon as they have the money.

‘Need to Get a Car’

“They come from cities that have excellent public transportation to a place where it is hard to catch a bus,” said Johnson Ng, director of the center’s orientation program. “We tell them that if they want a better job and the chance to advance themselves, they need to get a car.”

Because state Department of Motor Vehicles analysts, insurance companies and social scientists are reluctant to break down motorist information along ethnic lines, there have been no attempts to focus statistically on the numbers of immigrants among Los Angeles county’s 5.2 million drivers or their driving habits.

“There are serious concerns about how those kinds of figures might be used,” said Bill Gengler, a DMV spokesman.

But there are those who do loosely study immigrant drivers. Driving school owners and instructors, police officials, transportation planners and social workers each have their own vantage points.

On Saturday mornings, Korean merchants and homemakers drift into the traffic offender classroom of Kim’s driving school in Koreatown to expunge tickets from their records. More than 2,500 Koreans--nearly all of them adults and by Kim’s estimate, 40% of whom have driven less than two years--attended Kim’s traffic school last year, he said. A survey by the Korean Driving School Assn. of Los Angeles County of just five of their 22 member schools found that 7,000 Korean traffic offenders took classes for violations last year.

To Kim and his colleagues, the figures are troublesome. Despite the growth of the Korean community in Southern California, estimated to be as large as 400,000, the driving school owners see the numbers as evidence that Korean immigrants are having a hard time adapting.

“We constantly see drivers who went the wrong way on a one-way street because they can’t read signs in English,” Kim said. “Or they get tickets because they change lanes fast without signaling, just the way they used to drive in Korea.”

Habit Brought From Seoul

Driving school instructors have front-seat views of the adjustment woes that vex immigrant motorists. A short, professorial man called “teacher” by respectful students, Kim grimaces each times one of his charges tries to make a hurried turn at a yellow light at one of Koreatown’s street corners. It is a habit they learned driving the narrow, crowded roads of Seoul, where yellow lights signal a time to turn.

But even the most demanding of driving teachers find that after completing hours of lessons and winning their licenses, some immigrant students are still not ready to drive.

The results are visible on the crowded streets of Monterey Park, where motorcycle Patrolman Tony Jiron watches in disbelief as ambulances and fire trucks on their way to emergencies dodge in and out of heavy traffic, ignored by Chinese emigres who never pulled to the side of the road in their homeland.

“I couldn’t even begin to count the numbers of tickets I’ve given out for failure to get out of the way,” said Jiron, who now speeds to crime and accident scenes by taking deserted side roads.

As he maneuvers through jittery Koreatown traffic, Kim is used to similar oddities. Stopped at a corner on Pico Boulevard with a new student, he motioned to a long-bodied Buick at his right. A middle-aged Korean woman sat rigidly at the wheel. “Watch,” he said. When the light changed, her car shuddered into the intersection, and after two noisy false starts, finally accelerated.

“There are hundreds like her in the Korean community,” Kim said. “Ladies who are paralyzed with fear every time they get in a car.”

Muoi Tran was still terrified by her second driving lesson. Completely new to the automobile, its every mechanized tic made her flinch. Her teacher, Jason Chan, had to explain the car’s most basic functions, such as the purpose of the gas pedal and brake.

“She was afraid that any wrong move would make the car crash,” Chan said. “Americans grow up with the car naturally. But we forget that there are people in other countries who live and die without ever driving.”

In Los Angeles County, ethnic-oriented driving schools cater to Koreans, Mexicans, Central Americans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Armenians, Germans, Israelis, Turks and Indians. Driving school owners say that their industry, which once flourished by serving American teen-agers but then lost many to public school driving programs, now depends largely on adult immigrant clients for survival.

Most Cater to Immigrants

W. Hale Gammill II, president of the Driving School Assn. of California, estimated that as many as 60% of Los Angeles County’s 125 private driving schools serve primarily immigrant clients. Last year alone, seven Korean driving schools opened. “Most of the bigger driving schools are hurting for customers and shrinking, while the smaller schools that specialize in immigrants keep opening up,” he said.

Driving is literally Kim’s life. More than 13 years ago, he built his school on a stretch of Venice Boulevard wasteland dominated by auto salvage yards and body shops. He lives there with his wife and two sons above the school. Looming over their roof is a billboard showing a road-test dummy strapped into a car seat. Beside it is the school’s cheery slogan: “I Defensive Driving.”

Kim is a patient man who takes time to identify the car’s functions and parts for students new to driving. With Myong Cho Shin, a somber 56-year-old former engineer who had been in Los Angeles two weeks, Kim drove to a cul-de-sac south of the Santa Monica Freeway. There, he went over the basic functions until Shin, who spoke no English, could identify each in the foreign tongue.

Kim’s lessons usually proceed uneventfully on Koreatown’s streets. But there have been disturbing incidents. Native-born drivers, frustrated with the slow pace of Kim’s student drivers, sometimes lean on their horns and scream racial epithets.

“They say, ‘Why don’t you go back where you came from?’ ” Kim said. “At least four or five times a year, we are hit from behind, on purpose. Sometimes, they throw rocks.”

Leaders of Southern California’s Asian and Latino communities say ethnic stereotypes linking them with poor driving habits have been a continuing source of frustration.

The Latino community has for years been dogged by the image of the reckless driver who speeds down city streets in a battered, uninsured sedan.

“It dehumanizes us,” said Leo Estrada, an urban planner at UCLA who specializes in transportation. “The stereotype has been around so long I don’t think there’s any evidence we could bring up that would refute it in many drivers’ minds.”

‘It’s Very Divisive’

Similarly, Asian-American activists have been alarmed recently by the rise of a new image of Asians unable to control their cars. “There seems to be this growing feeling that Asian people are lousy drivers,” said Judy Chu, a professor of Asian-American studies at Cal State Los Angeles and a Garvey school district board member. “It’s very divisive and, I think, dangerous in an era when there is already heightened ill will toward immigrants.”

The stereotypes surface in jokes and banter. Three years ago at the annual Doo Dah Parade in Pasadena, a group calling themselves the “Chan Marino Driving School”--a play on San Marino’s large influx of Chinese immigrants--donned coolie hats and stumbled into one another as they proceeded down the parade route.

Last June, comedian Arsenio Hall, a host on Fox Broadcasting’s “The Late Show,” joked about how “if there is traffic backed up, you know an Oriental will be out front” and mimicked a Chinese accent.

When Dr. Leland Yee, president of the San Francisco office of the Asian Pacific American Coalition, heard about the monologue from a friend, he demanded an apology from the network. “I find such disparaging remarks against any minority group totally unacceptable,” he wrote.

Jack Breslan, the show’s spokesman, said Fox had received no protests and saw no reason to apologize.

The stereotypes have a darker side. In Monterey Park, where tensions over housing and congestion have at times run high between longtime residents and Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants, anti-Asian bumper stickers began circulating several years ago. They portrayed a caricature of an Asian driver inside a circle with a slash--the international “no” sign.

“When I drive in Monterey Park now, I feel paranoid,” Judy Chu said. “I have a fine driving record, but if I happen to make a wrong turn, I’m afraid someone might go after me for being one of those ‘terrible Asian drivers.’ Whatever the real situation may be with some immigrant drivers, people forget that it’s a ‘newness’ problem. They brand an entire race. It’s as if once we get on the highway, we throw any sense of empathy out the window.”

Monterey Park Police Capt. Joe Santoro blames the stereotypes on drivers’ tendencies “to think they’re the best on the road. If I get cut off on the highway by a driver like myself, I’d probably just call him a dirty name. But if I get cut off by someone of another ethnic group, that person’s ethnicity becomes part of the insult.”

The town’s main streets are often clotted with traffic. Shoppers shuttle in and out of convenience store parking lots all day long. While much of the congestion is blamed on the city’s explosive growth, a lapse in judgment by one driver can freeze the traffic flow on an already crowded street to gridlock.

Free Traffic Classes

Last December, the Monterey Park Police Department started a program to reach problem drivers. For 45 days, officers handed out 875 warning citations to motorists who committed non-hazardous violations such as driving under the speed limit and passing without signals. There were no fines, but the drivers will soon be asked to attend free three-hour traffic classes presented in English, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese and other languages.

Police officials found that the percentage of ethnic groups issued warnings mirrored the city’s racial composition. “No group got a disproportionate share of citations,” Santoro said.

The citations may have been a factor in the city’s sudden drop in traffic fatalities and injuries this year. Injury accidents were reduced 13% in the first eight months of 1987 over the same period in 1986. There has been only one traffic death this year, as opposed to four last year.

Traffic officers in Westminster are trying a similar program aimed at that city’s large Vietnamese immigrant population. Traffic Safety Officer Julie Newell said regular traffic tips are printed in Vietnamese newspapers, bilingual coloring books and flyers handed out with traffic tickets.

This month in the San Joaquin Valley town of Mendota, state Highway Patrol officers began delivering traffic safety brochures printed in Spanish to bars, markets and churches that serve the area’s Mexican immigrant population. Highway Patrol officials said 60% of the town’s fatal traffic accidents involved Latinos, who make up roughly 21% of the population.

If the pilot program is successful, it may be expanded elsewhere in the state, officials said.

In Los Angeles, there is no systematic program to reach the city’s dozens of immigrant communities. But groups of Los Angeles Police Department traffic officers have begun experimenting with their own ideas. In the Central Traffic District, two officers, Stan Hanaoka and Ignacio Rojas, show up weekly at apartment houses and recreation centers to tell immigrants about California driving. Since last August, they estimate they have spoken to 60,000 people.

At dusk on a recent weekday night, Rojas climbed rickety stairs in a Pico-Union tenement. As tenants and neighbors scrambled for seats on a wooden stairwell, Leandro Perez, a Neighborhood Watch representative, strung up a bed sheet on a window sill and readied a movie projector to play a Spanish-language film on driving safety.

As he spoke in Spanish, Rojas used props, a collage of color photographs of car wrecks and a shattered rear-view mirror. Before the lights dimmed, he asked the 35 people packed on the stairwell to raise their hands if they drove cars. None did.

But by the end of his presentation, Rojas’ audience had learned driving tips and regulations that they might otherwise learn through traffic tickets and accidents.

“When you’re starting from scratch,” Rojas said, “every little bit helps.”