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It’s Shocking How Many People Love Asian Food

What a disastrous Asian food market showed me about consumer demand

Ryan Fan
5 min readAug 25, 2022
Photo by George Zheng on Unsplash

I sat in traffic, not moving or only moving inches for about an hour and a half. I hadn’t encountered traffic this bad since I went to a Coldplay concert with my fiancee and friends, and got trapped in the parking lot for two hours.

A big UPS truck was trying to squeeze through the traffic to, you know, get to a UPS facility and deliver packages. But cars kept passing the truck in the rush to get into the event, leaving the truck also trapped in traffic, blocking off a whole lane for thirty minutes. They would swerve around it on the median of the highway, causing an even further delay.

As every car around us only moved a couple inches every 10 minutes, many non-drivers got out of their cars and realized walking two miles on the expressway would be faster than sitting in traffic.

Except this time it wasn’t a Coldplay concert that was causing this huge backlog in traffic. Sure, poorly coordinated traffic control played a factor, but this time, it was an Asian night market where over 50 prominent Asian restaurants in the Washington D.C. area gathered.

A disastrous event

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Ryan Fan
Ryan Fan

Written by Ryan Fan

Believer, Baltimore City IEP Chair, and 2:35 marathon runner. Diehard fan of “The Wire.”

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