Honking is good

Shanghai In 2007, honking was banned in Shanghai within the city limits (外环)[1]. I was six years old. When I first learned of the new law, I felt not for or against, but confused. Why did carmakers spend money making horns, which are apparently so evil that they need to be outlawed? It's like making pockets that you can't put things in. That's when I learned about the concept of road rage. Since then, I've noticed road rage all around me. Just two days ago, I witnessed the classic duo: the driver in front extending a middle finger out of the car window, shouting incoherently, while the driver in the back honks over and over as he inches to almost touch the car in front. Had I been in either car, I'd have been held hostage to a monologue about their fleeting feud — who wronged whom, and why the world needed to know.Every driver who honked with me in the passenger seat in Shanghai was filed as a rude driver in my young mind.They werealways enraged about something, sometimes as small as being stopped by a red light because the car in front won't run the yellow light. The honks always came with colorful swears...yet those drivers never hit anyone or were hit. They were just impatient people.ii. The Garden State ParkwayIn 2016, I had just left Shanghai for New Jersey for high school. My mother, an experienced driver though new to driving in the US, was driving on a sluggish highway. Behind us was an ostentatiously loud driver with his window rolled down who played music so loud I could hear it through the closed windows. I found him annoying as someone who did not want to be subjected to that music for long, since we were barely moving. He kept intermittently honking at us. We looked at each other and the road again; nothing seemed wrong. Then, he passed us on the right, wildly gesturing, seemingly angrily, honking some more. I had just settled in the U.S. and had recently heard about the stereotype that Asians can't drive[2]. I shrugged and told my mom that's probably