On a Sunday morning in Cypress, the parking lot of a Presbyterian church off Ball Road fills with families in their best clothes, the hymns inside switching between Korean and English mid-service. A few minutes east, parents compare notes on Oxford Academy admissions over cold noodles. This is the quiet centre of the Koreans in Cypress, California: a tidy north Orange County city that was once a dairy town, and is now home to one of the highest concentrations of Korean professional families in the county.
The Place
Cypress sits in the northwest corner of Orange County, a compact 6.6 square miles bordered by Buena Park, Anaheim, Garden Grove and the Los Angeles County line. It is a city of cul-de-sacs and well-kept lawns, with a median household income above 130,000 dollars and a reputation built almost entirely on its schools.
For most of the twentieth century, this was farmland. Today nearly four in ten residents are Asian American, and Korean families make up the single largest share of that, roughly one in ten people in the city. The transformation took about a generation.
The numbers tell the speed of it. As recently as 1980, the Asian share of Cypress stood at around seven percent. By the 2020 census it had passed 37 percent, one of the sharper demographic shifts of any city in Orange County. Nearly a third of residents are now foreign-born, and the median household income, above 130,000 dollars, places Cypress firmly among the county’s comfortable middle-class suburbs.
How It Became Korean
Cypress did not start out as anyone’s idea of a suburb. It started as cows.
From Waterville to Dairy City
The land was developed in the 1890s, fed by so many artesian wells that locals nicknamed the area Waterville. In the 1940s, dairy farmers pushed out of Los Angeles County by new subdivisions began relocating their herds here, and by the mid 1950s nearly half of Orange County’s dairies sat in and around Cypress.
When developers came knocking, the farmers incorporated to defend themselves. The city was founded as Dairy City on 24 July 1956, the name a deliberate shield against suburban tract housing. Within weeks the residents reconsidered and renamed it Cypress, after the trees that sheltered the old 1895 schoolhouse from the Santa Ana winds.
The 1965 turning point
The Korean story in Southern California begins, as so many do, with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The law abolished the national-origin quotas that had nearly sealed the United States to Asian immigrants, and Koreans arrived in large numbers through the 1970s and 1980s.
Most landed first in Los Angeles. The mid-Wilshire district that became Koreatown offered cheap rents and storefronts in a neighbourhood the wealthier crowd had abandoned, and it grew into the largest Korean centre in the country. For thousands of families, Koreatown was the port of entry, not the destination.
South to Orange County
As that first generation built savings and businesses, many looked south down the 5 and the 91 freeways toward Orange County, where the houses were newer, the streets quieter and, above all, the public schools extraordinary. The pattern is the same one that shaped the Korean community in Fullerton and the more recent boom in Korean Buena Park just next door.
Cypress, sandwiched between them, was a natural landing place. It had no Korean commercial strip of its own, and it did not need one. The shops, churches and grocers of north Orange County were minutes away, while Cypress itself offered what these families came for: a safe address zoned to some of the best schools in California.
The school magnet
If one institution explains the Korean draw to Cypress, it is Oxford Academy. The public magnet school, part of the Anaheim Union High School District, serves grades seven through twelve and has been ranked among the top two or three public high schools in all of California, sitting inside the top one percent nationally for test scores.
Admission is by competitive exam, and for academically ambitious Korean families the appeal is obvious. A Cypress address does not guarantee a seat, but it puts a child in the right district and the right after-school culture, surrounded by households that take the entrance test as seriously as they do.
The school’s results read like a different country. Roughly 94 percent of its students test proficient in mathematics against a California average near 34 percent, and reading proficiency sits close to 98 percent. For parents who crossed an ocean partly so their children could compete, those figures are not abstract. They are the entire point, and word of them travels fast through Korean church congregations and tutoring circles across north Orange County.
Cypress High School and the well-regarded local elementary and middle schools complete the picture. A family does not have to win the Oxford Academy lottery to benefit; simply living inside the Cypress School District and the Anaheim Union boundaries delivers schools that consistently outperform the state.
A community without a downtown
What grew in Cypress was therefore a residential Korean community rather than a commercial one. Korean Presbyterian and evangelical congregations took root, families clustered in particular neighbourhoods, and a quiet network of tutoring academies, churches and weekend gatherings did the work that a Koreatown main street does elsewhere. The visible Korean retail life stayed a short drive away in Buena Park and Garden Grove, while Cypress kept its lawns.
The Landmarks
Oxford Academy, 5172 Orange Avenue. The reason many Korean families chose Cypress in the first place. This exam-entry public magnet, serving grades seven to twelve, routinely ranks among the very best high schools in California, and its student body reflects the Asian and Korean households drawn to the city.
Korean Presbyterian Church of Cypress. One of the anchors of Korean religious life in the city, holding worship that moves between Korean and English to serve both the immigrant generation and their American-raised children. For many families the church, not a shopping plaza, is the true community centre.
Holy Faith Korean Presbyterian Church, 6269 Ball Road. A second Korean congregation in Cypress, on the main artery that runs west toward Buena Park. Korean churches like these double as language schools, social clubs and support networks for newly arrived families.
Cypress College, 9200 Valley View Street. The community college that sits among the city’s largest employers and serves as a practical stepping stone for many first-generation students before they transfer to the University of California system. Its diverse enrolment mirrors the surrounding neighbourhoods.
The Source OC, 6940 Beach Boulevard, Buena Park. Just over the city line, this open-air mall became the new epicentre of Korean Orange County after the South Korean cinema chain CGV opened here in 2017. Korean barbecue, bakeries and street-food stalls fill its levels, and Cypress families treat it as their nearest Korean high street.
Beach Boulevard Koreatown, Buena Park. In October 2023 the stretch of Beach Boulevard between Orangethorpe and Rosecrans Avenues was formally designated Orange County’s second Koreatown, home to more than a thousand Korean businesses. It is the commercial heart that Cypress’s residential Korean community quietly leans on.
Forest Lawn Memorial Park, 4471 Lincoln Avenue. The vast Cypress cemetery and memorial park where many of the area’s families, Korean among them, bury their dead. For an immigrant community, a plot here is one of the most permanent statements that this place has become home.
Where They Came From
The Koreans who settled in Cypress came overwhelmingly from South Korea, and within Korea from the cities. Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi region, along with port cities like Busan, sent the bulk of the post-1965 migration, much of it educated, urban and professional.
Almost none came straight to Cypress. The classic path ran through Los Angeles first, where a family might run a shop or work in Koreatown for a decade before moving the household to Orange County once the money and the green cards were secure. The move south was, in effect, a graduation: from immigrant enclave to suburban homeowner.
What pulled them specifically to Cypress was not heritage but ambition for the next generation. These were parents who measured a city by its schools, and who were willing to trade the convenience of a Korean main street for a district where their children could test into the best classrooms in the state.
That priority sets Cypress apart from the older enclaves. In Los Angeles Koreatown the draw was work and community; here the draw was the next twenty years of a child’s life. The decision to buy in Cypress was usually made with a school district map open on the kitchen table, and it tied the family to a place in a way a rented Koreatown apartment never had.
Cypress Today
Cypress today is a city of roughly 49,000 people where Korean American life is woven into the ordinary fabric rather than concentrated on a single street. You hear it in the languages spoken at the supermarket, see it in the church marquees, and read it in the surnames on the Oxford Academy honour rolls.
The community remains, by design, low-key. The retail energy belongs to neighbouring Buena Park and Garden Grove, while Cypress holds onto its identity as the place you live, raise children and stay. Many of the second generation, raised in these cul-de-sacs and educated in these schools, have moved on to universities and careers across the country, the way the children of Korean Irvine and Koreatown in Los Angeles have.
Yet the churches keep filling on Sundays, the parents keep comparing tutoring schedules, and new families keep arriving for the same reason the first ones did. Cypress is not a Korean enclave you can point to on a map. It is something quieter and, for the families who chose it, something more durable.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Koreans live in Cypress, California?
Korean Americans make up roughly one in ten of Cypress’s population of about 49,000, the single largest national-origin group within an Asian American community that accounts for nearly 40 percent of the city. That makes the Koreans in Cypress, California one of the densest Korean populations in Orange County.
Why did Korean families move to Cypress?
The main draw was education. Cypress is zoned to some of California’s best public schools, above all Oxford Academy, and Korean families known for prizing academic achievement moved south from Los Angeles to put their children in those classrooms.
Is there a Koreatown in Cypress?
Not within Cypress itself. The Korean community here is residential, while the commercial Koreatown sits next door along Beach Boulevard in Buena Park, designated Orange County’s second Koreatown in 2023 and home to more than a thousand Korean businesses.
What is the connection between Cypress and Los Angeles Koreatown?
Most Korean families in Cypress arrived in America through Los Angeles, often living and working in Koreatown for years before moving to Orange County. Cypress represents the suburban next step for families who had already established themselves in the city.
Where do Koreans in Cypress shop and worship?
Korean churches such as the Korean Presbyterian Church of Cypress and Holy Faith Korean Presbyterian Church serve as community hubs, while families shop and dine a few minutes away at The Source OC and along Beach Boulevard in Buena Park.
When did the Korean community in Cypress form?
It grew mainly from the 1980s onward, as Korean immigrants who arrived after the 1965 Immigration Act built up savings in Los Angeles and moved south to Orange County suburbs like Cypress, Fullerton and Buena Park in search of better schools and quieter streets.
If your family’s story passed through Cypress, or any of the places Koreans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a first apartment in Los Angeles Koreatown to a house zoned for Oxford Academy, to wherever you are now.