There are few places in the United States that hold greater significance to the Chinese-American community than Monterey Park, Calif.
Known as the first suburban Chinatown, the city owes its changes to the late Chinese American real estate developer Fred Hsieh, who promoted the community about seven miles east of downtown Los Angeles as the “Chinese Beverly Hills.”
His vision would ignite a demographic transformation starting in the 1970s as Monterey Park and the neighboring city of Alhambra welcomed more and more middle-class ethnic Chinese residents from both home and abroad. In 1983, the city made history by naming its first Chinese American female mayor, Lily Lee Chen.
Ms. Chen opposed xenophobia and led a fight against an English language-only movement in the city, which was driven by residents who were upset about the cultural changes sweeping their community. The tension would last decades, and bids to impose “modern Latin lettering” on city signage were the source of contentious disputes as recently as 2013.
The resistance had little effect. By the 1990s, Monterey Park had all but replaced Los Angeles’s Chinatown as the metropolitan area’s prime destination for authentic Chinese food. The biggest Asian supermarkets began sprouting up, stocked with the freshest produce and dominated by ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs from Vietnam. Schools in the area also grappled with massive changes to their student bodies as Chinese families demanded greater emphasis on academics, leading to the demise of activities such as football programs.
Delegations from China and Taiwan made a point of visiting Monterey Park on trips to Los Angeles. City Council members who had no background in international relations received crash courses in managing the two sides, learning to avoid mentioning the Taiwan Strait and to seat Taiwanese and Chinese delegates equidistant to the mayor at official banquets to assure that neither camp felt disrespected.
Monterey Park’s development mirrored the changes taking place thousands of miles away in Asia. While many of the first ethnic Chinese residents in the city came from Hong Kong and Taiwan, it would increasingly take in arrivals from mainland China starting around 2000 as the world’s most populous country experienced historic economic growth.
Trade between the United States and China compelled more wealthy Chinese immigrants to plant roots in the city, but it also made it a destination for undocumented immigrants, who were funneled into jobs in the suburb’s many restaurants, nail salons and massage parlors.
Eventually, Monterey Park would adopt some of the traits of a working-class urban Chinatown. Employment agencies offering minimum-wage jobs increasingly lined one of its main thoroughfares, Garvey Avenue. The city would also become home to a growing number of illegal boarding houses for undocumented immigrants. By then, many middle and upper middle-class ethnic Chinese had skipped Monterey Park and moved farther east in the San Gabriel Valley to fill homes and mansions in communities such as Arcadia and Walnut.