On a Saturday morning in Vernon Hills, the queue outside Yu’s Mandarin on East Phillip Road can stretch past the door before noon, families waiting for hand pulled noodles and soup dumplings the way their parents once queued in Beijing or Taipei. The Chinese in Vernon Hills are not a story of a downtown enclave with painted gates. They are a story of subdivisions, top ranked schools, and a quiet remaking of an affluent Lake County village that, sixty years ago, was little more than a golf course and a few hundred houses.
The Place
Vernon Hills sits about thirty five miles north of Chicago, in Lake County, two miles west of Interstate 94 at the corner of Milwaukee Avenue and Townline Road. It is a planned suburb in the truest sense, stitched together from more than forty subdivisions laid out across former farmland from the 1960s onward.
The village incorporated on 16 June 1958 with just 123 residents and 125 houses. By the 2020 census it held 26,850 people, with a median household income well above the Illinois average and a tax base anchored by retail and corporate headquarters.
It is the kind of place that draws families for one reason above all others: the schools. That single fact explains much of who lives here, and why so many of them are Chinese.
How It Became Chinese
The Chinese presence in Vernon Hills did not arrive in a single wave. It accumulated, household by household, over roughly three decades, tracking the broader migration of educated, Mandarin speaking professionals into Chicago’s northern and northwestern suburbs.
The professional migration
For most of the twentieth century, Chinese Chicago meant the South Side Chinatown around Cermak Road and Wentworth Avenue, a Cantonese and Toishanese world of laundries, restaurants, and family associations. The suburban Chinese story is different in kind.
It begins with the immigration reforms of 1965, which scrapped the national origins quotas and opened the door to skilled migrants. Over the following decades, a new kind of Chinese immigrant arrived in greater Chicago: engineers, physicians, accountants, researchers, often arriving first as graduate students at universities and then settling wherever the work was.
These were not people drawn to the old Chinatown. They were drawn to jobs and, above all, to schools. As the American Association of Geographers has documented, the Chinese who came to the Chicago area dispersed across the suburbs according to professional opportunity, settling in middle and upper middle class communities to the west and north of the city rather than in the historic core.
Why Vernon Hills
Vernon Hills offered three things that mattered to this generation. It had new, affordable family housing in those forty plus subdivisions. It sat within reach of the corporate corridors of Lake and northern Cook counties. And it fed into schools that consistently ranked among the strongest in the state.
The corporate draw was real. Vernon Hills became the headquarters of CDW, the technology retailer, and of Zebra Technologies, the barcode and tracking firm, alongside other large employers anchored near Hawthorn Mall. For a family weighing a transfer or a new job, a short commute to a stable employer mattered.
But the schools mattered more. Northern Vernon Hills feeds Vernon Hills High School, which ranks in the top ten percent of Illinois schools for test scores. The southern part of the village sends students to Adlai E. Stevenson High School in nearby Lincolnshire, one of the highest performing public high schools in the state, ranked in the top one percent.
The tipping point
The numbers tell the story of acceleration. In 2011, Vernon Hills counted 4,858 residents of Asian ancestry, 19.3 percent of the village, already the sixth highest share of any Chicago suburb. By the 2020 census, the Asian population had climbed to 6,931 people, or roughly 25.8 percent of the village.
Chinese families form one of the largest strands within that Asian quarter, alongside South Asian and Korean neighbours. The growth was self reinforcing. Once a critical mass of Chinese families settled, the institutions followed: the grocers, the restaurants, the weekend tutoring, the word of mouth network that tells a cousin in Shanghai or a colleague in San Jose that Vernon Hills is a good place to land.
That is how a planned golf course suburb, founded by a handful of farmers and developers, became a place where a quarter of the population traces its roots to Asia, and where Mandarin is a language you hear in the aisles of the supermarket and the bleachers at the high school gym.
The Landmarks
Yu’s Mandarin, 4 East Phillip Road. The Vernon Hills outpost of a Chicagoland institution that began decades ago in Hoffman Estates, Yu’s Mandarin draws crowds for its fresh, hand made noodles and northern Chinese cooking. For many Chinese families in the village, it is the default place to take visiting relatives, the closest thing Vernon Hills has to a communal dining room.
Family Oriental Mart, 115 East Townline Road. A neighbourhood Asian grocer where the everyday ingredients of a Chinese kitchen sit within a short drive of any subdivision. It is the kind of small, unglamorous shop that signals a community has put down roots, stocking the sauces, greens, and dried goods that the big chain supermarkets do not carry.
Hawthorn Mall, off Milwaukee Avenue at Townline Road. Opened in 1973 on former farmland, the roughly 1.2 million square foot shopping centre is the commercial heart of Vernon Hills and one of its largest employers. For arriving families it has long served as a first orientation point, the place where suburban life is bought, returned, and exchanged.
Mellody Farm, 851 to 1101 Milwaukee Avenue. A 200 million dollar open air retail development built on a former soybean field, Mellody Farm opened on 28 September 2018 with Whole Foods Market, Nordstrom Rack, REI, and Barnes & Noble. Its arrival confirmed that Vernon Hills had become affluent enough to draw the kind of retail that follows professional, high income households.
Cuneo Mansion and Gardens, 1350 North Milwaukee Avenue. Built in 1914 and once owned by utilities magnate Samuel Insull, the Italianate estate and its Jens Jensen designed grounds were donated to Loyola University Chicago in 2009. It is the village’s grandest landmark, a reminder that this land held wealth long before the subdivisions arrived.
Century Park. A 113 acre village park, more than half of it water, with trails, courts, and fishing. On warm weekends it fills with families from across the village’s communities, the kind of shared public space where a Chinese grandmother walking with a grandchild is an ordinary sight.
Half Day Forest Preserve. A Lake County preserve on the village’s edge with a mile of trail for walkers, cyclists, and cross country skiers. Its open prairie and sunrise skies are a quiet counterpoint to the malls, and a favourite of early morning walkers.
Where They Came From
The Chinese of Vernon Hills are, for the most part, a post 1965 professional migration rather than a descendant community of the old Cantonese Chinatown. Their origins are correspondingly varied: mainland China, especially the major cities, alongside Taiwan and the wider Chinese diaspora.
Many arrived by way of the American university and the American workplace. A graduate degree at an Illinois or Midwestern campus, then a job in technology, healthcare, finance, or engineering, then a house chosen for its school district. The path runs through the lecture hall and the office, not the laundry or the restaurant kitchen.
This shapes the texture of the community. It is Mandarin speaking more than Cantonese, professional more than entrepreneurial in its first generation, and intensely focused on education. The pattern echoes other affluent Chinese suburbs across the country, from the Chinese in Princeton, New Jersey to the Chinese in Folsom, California and the Chinese in Chandler, Arizona, where the same engine of skilled migration and school district selection has done the same work.
Within Illinois, Vernon Hills belongs to a constellation of suburbs that drew the same families. The nearby story of the Chinese in Northbrook, Illinois runs in close parallel, and the broader northwestern suburbs, captured in accounts of the Pakistanis in Schaumburg, Illinois and the Greeks in Palos Hills, Illinois, show how immigrant professionals reshaped the Chicago suburbs one school district at a time.
Vernon Hills Today
Today the Chinese presence in Vernon Hills is woven into ordinary suburban life rather than concentrated in a single visible quarter. There is no gated Chinatown here, no ceremonial arch. Instead there is a restaurant queue on Phillip Road, a grocer on Townline, and a high school gym where Chinese surnames fill the honour rolls.
The community’s centre of gravity is the school, as it has been from the beginning. The strength of Vernon Hills High School and of Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire continues to pull Chinese families in, and the weekend rhythms of tutoring, music lessons, and college preparation are a familiar part of the calendar in many homes.
It is an honest portrait, and not a uniform one. Some Chinese residents are recent arrivals on work visas, renting near the corporate offices. Others have raised children here who have already left for university and careers, returning for holidays to a village their parents chose for them. The community is professional, dispersed, and quietly confident, less a neighbourhood than a network spread across the subdivisions.
What ties it together is the thing that drew it: a belief that this affluent Lake County village, with its malls and its preserves and above all its schools, is a good place to build an American life. On that point, the Chinese of Vernon Hills and the developers who laid out those forty subdivisions turn out to have agreed all along.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Chinese people live in Vernon Hills, Illinois?
Census figures do not break out Chinese residents alone, but the Asian population of Vernon Hills reached 6,931 people, about 25.8 percent of the village, in the 2020 census, up from 4,858 in 2011. The Chinese in Vernon Hills form one of the largest strands within that Asian quarter, alongside South Asian and Korean neighbours.
Why did so many Chinese families settle in Vernon Hills?
The Chinese in Vernon Hills are largely a professional, post 1965 migration drawn by three things: affordable new family housing across the village’s many subdivisions, proximity to corporate employers such as CDW and Zebra Technologies, and access to some of the highest ranked public schools in Illinois.
Which schools serve Vernon Hills?
Northern Vernon Hills feeds Vernon Hills High School, in the top ten percent of Illinois schools for test scores. Southern parts of the village send students to Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, ranked among the top one percent of public high schools in the state, both with large Asian student bodies.
Where can you find Chinese food and groceries in Vernon Hills?
Yu’s Mandarin at 4 East Phillip Road is the best known Chinese restaurant, an offshoot of a long running Chicagoland kitchen famous for hand pulled noodles. Family Oriental Mart at 115 East Townline Road is a neighbourhood Asian grocer stocking the staples of a Chinese kitchen.
Is there a historic Chinatown in Vernon Hills?
No. Unlike Chicago’s South Side Chinatown around Cermak Road, the Chinese in Vernon Hills are dispersed across suburban subdivisions rather than concentrated in a single enclave. The community is defined by school districts and professional networks, not by a downtown core or ceremonial gateway.
When did Vernon Hills become an affluent suburb?
Vernon Hills incorporated in 1958 with just 123 residents and grew rapidly from the 1960s as more than forty subdivisions and the 1973 Hawthorn Mall transformed former farmland. Developments like the 2018 Mellody Farm retail centre confirmed its standing as one of the most desirable suburbs in the Chicago metropolitan area.
If your family’s story passed through Vernon Hills, or any of the places Chinese families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a university lecture hall in China or Taiwan to a house chosen for a Lake County school district, to wherever you are now.