Trespassers?. Willow Lung-Amam
Among this generation of Silicon Valley newcomers, many found themselves at home both in the American suburbs and abroad. Their bicultural identities and transnational landscapes reflected their transpacific lifestyles.94 As Wei Li put it, these global sojourners were as comfortable crossing oceans and countries as Main Street, USA.95
The mobility of many Silicon Valley newcomers changed their pattern of sociability and community. It was increasingly common, Andrew Li noted, to find Taiwanese Americans who ran companies in which the manufacturing was done in China, their business headquarters were in Taiwan, and the family home was in Silicon Valley. Asian Americans’ frequent border crossings fostered important social networks, business ties, and familial connections that expanded their sense of place and home.96 At the same time, they also disrupted old social patterns. Comparing his friends’ lives to previous generations of Taiwanese immigrants, Andrew explained that overseas travel had become such a regular part of their lifestyles that it was difficult to get people together, even for a weekend barbeque.
Among this class of global cosmopolitans, the North County suburbs served as important gateway communities, especially those that were already popular among the Asian American middle class such as Milpitas, Cupertino, and Fremont. Word of mouth and established connections reinforced these suburbs as popular immigrant destinations. This extended to Taiwan, India, and mainland China, where the zip codes of these suburbs were well known.97 Ellie Cho, a second-generation Chinese American who was a young student at Mission San Jose High School in Fremont when we met, understood the importance of immigrant succession in affecting the decision of families such as hers to settle in Fremont. “Immigrants who are moving in America, they are thinking like, oh, where am I going to fit in?,” she explained. “Where am I going to make a transition the easiest?” For her parents, she understood the answer to be clear: “In Fremont, [the] Bay Area, because there’s so many Asians here already.”
Not everyone came to Fremont with the intention of settling in an Asian American community, but many found the city’s ethnic diversity and its now-established ethnic businesses and social institutions comfortable and convenient. This included Timothy Hu, an immigrant from Taiwan who had spent most of his life working in the American Midwest. He explained that during his three decades there, he always “felt like a minority.” Upon retirement, he and his wife Doreen decided to move closer to their daughter and other family members who lived in the Bay Area. Having found a residential subdivision that was close to his daughter that Doreen liked and that had new homes (which both Timothy and Doreen wanted) and good feng shui, they settled in the Fremont hills. Quickly, their lifestyles began to change. As they were now located close to three major airports with direct flights to Asia, the Hus began making more frequent trips to mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, where they held important social and business connections. Within a 15-minute drive they could be at any one of four Asian shopping centers, where they frequently ate out at restaurants that Timothy claimed were far better than those in San Francisco’s and Oakland’s Chinatowns. Just down the road in Milpitas, his wife began frequenting a Chinese Buddhist temple that was located along the city’s historic main street. Once a week, Timothy made a longer drive across the bay to Millbrae, a suburb south of San Francisco, where he joined a Chinese opera club. While they had not planned on it, the Hus stayed in Fremont because they discovered that it was “good for Asians.” They had all the community and cultural amenities they desired. Just as important, living in a city where “everyone is a minority,” Timothy noted, he no longer felt like one himself.
With plenty of room for new residential, commercial, and office development, Asian American newcomers shaped the character of Fremont far more than in most Silicon Valley suburbs. For its growth between 1990 and 2000, Robert Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy ranked Fremont fourth among the nation’s “boomburbs,” cities with populations over 100,000 that were growing rapidly.98 In the same study, Fremont ranked as the nation’s number one “cosmoburb” growing suburbs with particularly high numbers of foreign-born, highly educated residents, especially non-Hispanic Whites and Asian Americans.99
By 2010, Fremont was the largest Asian American–majority city in Silicon Valley and, in fact, the largest majority Asian American municipality in the continental United States.100 Known to many as “Little Taipei” and “Little India,” Fremont had become a popular meeting ground for successful young Asian Americans. Along with many other Silicon Valley suburbs, Fremont ranked among the wealthiest municipalities in the country, and among the city’s residents, Asian Americans were some of the most prosperous. In 2014, the American Community Survey estimated the median income of Asian Americans in Fremont to be nearly $125,000, compared to around $100,000 for the city as a whole.101 Asian American newcomers congregated in some of Fremont’s most prestigious neighborhoods, including Avalon, the 275-home gated community in which Timothy and Doreen lived and where homes regularly sold for upwards of $2 million (Figure 5).102
FIGURE 5. Inside the Avalon, one of Fremont’s gated communities, signs of Asian Americans’ presence are readily apparent in many homes. Photo by author.
Fremont had become popular not only among Asian Americans working in high tech but also for high-tech businesses, especially those run by Asian Americans. Between 1990 and 2000, around 1,200 high-tech firms set up shop in Fremont.103 According to former mayor Bob Wasserman, before the tech crash in 2000, the city had more high-tech headquarters than San Francisco.104 That same year, it was also reportedly the most popular city in the United States for Taiwanese high-tech companies, with over 100 firms with connections to Taiwan.105 Like many before them, companies that were relocating or expanding their operations from overseas found advantage in Fremont’s inexpensive industrial and warehouse space and strategic location within Silicon Valley. Increasingly, they were also attracted to the city’s easy access to emerging Pacific Rim high-tech hubs and its growing population of highly skilled immigrants. To locate where the technology startups are the thickest, wrote Mark Hendricks, a writer for a blog run by American Express®, “Go west, young entrepreneur. When you reach Fremont, California, you’re there.” In 2012, the credit card giant reported that Fremont had more than 21 technology startups for every 100,000 people—a ratio that was nearly as much as the next three cities combined.106
By 2010, the transformation of Silicon Valley from a landscape of cauliflower fields and White working- and middle-class suburban communities to the hub of Asian American life in northern California was complete. Nearly a half century of immigration had transformed once-fledgling Asian American destinations into mature immigrant gateways (Maps 2 and 3).
MAP 2. In 1980, Asian Americans could be found in limited numbers throughout many Silicon Valley communities. Image by the author.
MAP 3. By 2010, the Asian American population in Silicon Valley exploded. Chinese Americans and Indian Americans, who tend to be employed as scientists and engineers in the valley, made up the bulk of new migrants, particularly in the region’s middle-class suburbs such as Fremont. Image by author.
Between 2000 and 2010, while Santa Clara County’s Asian American population grew by 140,000 to over 565,000, San Francisco County added only 28,000 new Asian American residents, with a population totaling less than half that of Santa Clara. By 2010, Santa Clara County had also eclipsed San Francisco in its percentage of foreign-born residents, 37% to 36%. As historian Margaret O’Mara observed, the rise of Silicon Valley resulted in a pattern of residents moving from the “suburbs in which they live to the suburbs in which they work.”107 For a new generation of middle-class Asian Americans, the suburbs were the only America they knew or needed.
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