On a Saturday morning, the parking lot off Barber Lane fills before the shops open. Families in puffer jackets wait outside Sheng Kee for fresh egg tarts, the fish counter at 99 Ranch is already busy with cleavers and ice, and the whole low-slung plaza hums in Mandarin. This is the everyday centre of gravity for the Chinese in Milpitas, California, a city that turned in a single generation from a Ford factory town into one of the most Asian places in the state.
The Place
Milpitas sits in the northeastern corner of Santa Clara County, wedged between San Jose to the south and Fremont to the north, with the Diablo Range rising behind it to the east. Its name comes from the Spanish for little cornfields, a reminder that this was farmland and orchards well within living memory. The city covers about 13.5 square miles and counts roughly 80,000 residents.
What makes Milpitas extraordinary is the make-up of those residents. As of the 2020 census, Asian Americans were 71.3 percent of the city, up from 51.5 percent in 2000 and only a sliver of the population a generation before that. By most measures it is the most Asian city in California, and a large share of that growth has been Chinese.
How It Became Chinese
Milpitas did not start out as a place anyone associated with China. For most of the twentieth century it was a quiet agricultural town. In 1950, half its residents still lived on farms, surrounded by thousands of acres of orchards and dairy fields. The change began with a factory.
The Ford years
In 1952, Ford Motor Company decided to move its Northern California assembly plant from Richmond to Milpitas. The plant opened on 17 May 1955, and at its peak employed around 6,000 workers turning out dozens of cars and trucks an hour. The town incorporated as a city on 26 January 1954, partly to manage the boom the plant was about to bring.
For three decades the Ford plant was the centre of working life in Milpitas. It built houses, schools, and a blue-collar identity. Then in 1983 it closed, and the building sat empty until it was converted into the Great Mall of the Bay Area, which reopened in 1994. By then the town it had built was already being remade by a different industry entirely.
Silicon Valley arrives
As the auto plant wound down, the semiconductor and computer industry was spreading north and east out of Santa Clara and San Jose. Milpitas, with cheaper land than Cupertino or Palo Alto and an easy freeway position on Interstate 880 and 680, became a natural home for hardware companies. Cisco Systems, KLA, and Flex would all put thousands of jobs here.
That tech economy is the engine of the Chinese community. By the most recent figures, more than a third of Milpitas men and more than a quarter of its women work in computer and electronic products. These are the jobs that drew engineers and their families.
The Taiwanese first wave
The earliest large group of Chinese settlers in Milpitas came from Taiwan, many of them graduate students who had studied engineering at American universities in the 1970s and 1980s and stayed for the work. They were professionals, comfortable in English, and they wanted what every Silicon Valley family wanted: a safe street, a short commute, and good schools.
They found all three in Milpitas, and crucially they found each other. As Taiwanese engineers clustered, the businesses that served them followed. Bakeries, herbalists, banquet restaurants, and grocery stores opened to a customer base that already lived nearby. The same pattern played out in neighbouring towns, and the Taiwanese in Cupertino built a parallel world a few exits down the freeway.
The mainland wave and the mall that anchored it
From the late 1990s onward, the balance shifted toward immigrants from mainland China, arriving as the country opened up and as American tech firms hired aggressively from Chinese universities. They came on H-1B visas, often through Berkeley, Stanford, or campuses back home, and many settled first as renters before buying into Milpitas.
The single most important Chinese landmark in the South Bay grew up to serve them. Milpitas Square, a sprawling plaza on Barber Lane just west of Interstate 880, became one of the first major Chinese shopping centres in the South Bay and grew into the largest Asian mall in Northern California, with more than 60 tenants across roughly 170,000 square feet. Its signage is largely in Chinese, its anchor is a 99 Ranch Market, and for a quarter of a century it has been the place where new arrivals get their bearings.
Milpitas became a kind of staging ground in the wider Silicon Valley Chinese map. Families often moved between the same cluster of towns as their careers and budgets changed, and the Chinese in Fremont just over the county line and the Chinese in Sunnyvale form part of the same continuous community.
The Landmarks
Milpitas Square, 190 Barber Lane. The heart of Chinese Milpitas and one of the first major Chinese-oriented shopping centres in the South Bay. For more than twenty-five years it has been the largest Asian mall in Northern California, a place where you can buy a wok, see a herbalist, eat dim sum, and read every sign in Chinese without leaving the lot.
99 Ranch Market, 338 Barber Lane. The anchor of Milpitas Square and the gravitational centre of weekend life. 99 Ranch is the largest Asian supermarket chain in the United States, and its Milpitas store, with live fish tanks and a butchery counter, is where the community stocks its kitchens.
Sheng Kee Bakery, 386 Barber Court. A famous Taiwanese bakery chain with a busy branch in Milpitas Square. The morning queue for pineapple buns, egg tarts, and taro bread is a fixture, and the cake counter quietly handles half the birthdays in the neighbourhood.
Mayflower Restaurant, Milpitas Square. A banquet-scale Cantonese and seafood restaurant where dim sum carts roll at lunch and round tables fill with extended families on weekends. It is the kind of room where engagements are celebrated and Lunar New Year is marked over lobster noodles.
Cheung Hing, 1235 East Calaveras Boulevard. A long-running dim sum and Hong Kong-style spot away from the Square, proof that Chinese Milpitas is not confined to one plaza. Locals treat it as a neighbourhood institution for steamed dumplings and roast meats.
Avatamsaka Buddhist Lotus Society, 50 South Main Street. A Taiwanese Buddhist temple offering services and study in Chinese, one of several places of worship that anchor the community spiritually rather than commercially. It marks the lunar calendar for families who keep those rhythms.
The Great Mall of the Bay Area, 447 Great Mall Drive. The reborn Ford plant, now around 200 stores under one roof. It is not a Chinese landmark in the way the Square is, but it sits at the literal centre of the city’s history, the building that brought the first wave of jobs that everything else grew from.
Where They Came From
The Chinese in Milpitas come, broadly, from two streams. The first is Taiwan, the engineers and their families who arrived through American graduate schools from the 1970s on and who shaped the early character of the community, from the bakeries to the temples.
The second is the Chinese mainland, especially the big technical-university cities, whose graduates came in growing numbers from the late 1990s as Silicon Valley’s hiring globalised. Cantonese-speaking families with roots in Hong Kong and Guangdong are woven through both streams.
What unites them is not a single home province but a single path: an engineering or science education, a visa, and a job in hardware or software within a short drive of Barber Lane. Milpitas offered the rare combination of affordable family homes, top-rated schools, and a ready-made Chinese commercial life next door.
Milpitas Today
Today Milpitas is a city where Chinese life is simply the mainstream, not a niche. The schools tell the story plainly. Students at Milpitas High School are around 68 percent Asian, and at top-ranked Curtner Elementary the figure is closer to 76 percent. The district posts math and reading proficiency rates roughly double the California average, which is exactly what the engineering families came for.
The city is also better connected than it has ever been. The Milpitas BART station opened in June 2020, linking the South Bay to the East Bay rail network and tying Milpitas more tightly to Fremont and the wider region. Three light-rail stations add to the network.
It is worth saying that Chinese Milpitas does not stand alone. The city is also home to a large South Asian population, and the story of the Indians in Milpitas runs in parallel to this one, two engineering diasporas sharing the same streets and schools. Across the South Bay the pattern repeats, from the Chinese in Cupertino to dozens of other towns. For a fuller picture of the city itself, the Milpitas entry on Wikipedia traces its demographic transformation in detail, and KQED’s history of the Ford plant explains how the town was built in the first place.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Chinese community in Milpitas, California?
Milpitas is about 71 percent Asian as of the 2020 census, the highest share of any city in California, and Chinese Americans make up a large part of that figure alongside a substantial Indian community. The Chinese in Milpitas form one of the densest concentrations in the South Bay.
What is Milpitas Square?
Milpitas Square is a Chinese-oriented shopping centre on Barber Lane, anchored by a 99 Ranch Market. It is one of the first major Chinese shopping centres in the South Bay and grew into the largest Asian mall in Northern California, with more than 60 tenants across roughly 170,000 square feet.
Why did so many Chinese families settle in Milpitas?
The Silicon Valley tech industry is the main reason. Chinese engineers, first from Taiwan and later from mainland China, took jobs at hardware and software firms nearby and chose Milpitas for its affordable family homes, strong schools, and ready-made Chinese commercial district.
Are Milpitas schools good?
Yes. Milpitas High School ranks in the top roughly 7 percent of California high schools, and elementary schools like Curtner rank in the top few percent statewide. District math and reading proficiency rates run about double the California average, a major draw for the Chinese in Milpitas.
How is Milpitas different from Fremont or Cupertino?
All three are major Chinese hubs in the Silicon Valley diaspora, but Milpitas sits in Santa Clara County between San Jose and Fremont and historically offered more affordable homes. Many families move among these towns as careers and budgets change, making them part of one continuous community.
Where do Chinese residents in Milpitas shop and eat?
Milpitas Square is the focal point, with 99 Ranch Market, Sheng Kee Bakery, and restaurants like Mayflower for dim sum. Dim sum spots such as Cheung Hing on Calaveras Boulevard serve the parts of the community that live away from the Square.
If your family’s story passed through Milpitas, or any of the places Chinese families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a graduate-school visa and a first apartment near Barber Lane, to a house in the Milpitas hills and a Saturday queue at the bakery, to wherever you are now.