On a weekend morning at the corner of Atlantic Boulevard and Garvey Avenue, the signage reads in two alphabets at once. A Bank of America branch wears Chinese characters above its windows; a supermarket promises herbs and roast duck; a tea house weighs out ginseng by the ounce. The Chinese in Monterey Park did not arrive at a Chinatown that someone else had built. They built the suburb itself, lawn by lawn and storefront by storefront, until a quiet bedroom community east of Los Angeles became the symbolic root of Chinese suburban America.
Most American Chinatowns grew downtown, packed and vertical, out of exclusion and necessity. This one grew sideways across single-family blocks, with driveways and two-car garages, and it grew on purpose. That difference is the whole story.
Monterey Park: The Place
Monterey Park sits in the western San Gabriel Valley, about seven miles east of downtown Los Angeles, a compact city of roughly eight square miles. Its commercial life runs along two crossing arteries, Atlantic Boulevard north to south and Garvey Avenue east to west, lined with strip malls and banquet halls. The housing is mostly modest postwar stock, ranch homes and stucco bungalows built during the population booms of the late 1940s and 1950s. Gentle hills on the city’s edges would later give it a marketable resemblance to Taipei.
How Monterey Park Became Chinese
Before the Chinese
The land began as part of a Spanish-era ranch, bought after the Civil War by an Italian immigrant named Alessandro Repetto. A subdivision called Ramona Acres opened in 1906, and the city incorporated as Monterey Park on May 29, 1916, by a vote of 455 to 33.
For its first half-century the city was a white, middle-class suburb. The population climbed from about 20,000 in 1950 to nearly 50,000 by 1970, fed by the same postwar migration that filled bedroom communities all over Southern California. As late as 1970, the city was only around fifteen percent Asian. There was a small, established Japanese American presence and a growing number of Mexican American families, but nothing that hinted at what the next two decades would bring.
The Chinese Arrive
The turn began with one realtor and a deliberate idea. Frederic Hsieh, born in 1945 and raised in Hong Kong, arrived in the United States as a student in the 1960s and settled in Monterey Park around 1972. He had read the political weather correctly: the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act had reopened the door to Asian immigration, and rising tension between Taiwan and the mainland was about to push a generation of educated, capital-rich families to look for somewhere safe to land.
Hsieh founded Mandarin Realty and began quietly buying property. Then he advertised. Through newspapers in Taipei and Hong Kong he marketed Monterey Park as the “Chinese Beverly Hills,” a place with American schools and clean suburban streets where a Mandarin speaker could feel at home. He pointed out that the hills looked like Taipei’s and leaned on the lucky resonance of numbers, the kind of detail that made the pitch land.
In 1977 he gathered some of the city’s civic and business leaders for a lunch and told them, in effect, that he was building the next Chinatown in their suburb. The mostly white audience was skeptical, even affronted. But Hsieh had already started, and chain migration did the rest. Early buyers wrote home; relatives and friends followed; Chinese-language banks, realtors, and supermarkets opened to serve them, which in turn made the next family’s move easier.
Monterey Park at Its Peak
The numbers moved fast. The Asian share of the city rose from roughly fifteen percent in 1970 to about 34 percent in 1980, then crossed the line that made national news. The 1990 census recorded Monterey Park as 56 percent Asian, making it the first city in the continental United States with an Asian-majority population. The press began calling it “Little Taipei.”
Daily life took on a distinctly Chinese rhythm. Dim sum carts rattled through banquet halls on weekend mornings, and Cantonese seafood palaces filled with extended families ordering live fish from tanks by the door. Ocean Star opened a 900-seat dining room on Atlantic Boulevard in 1982 and reigned for years as a premier dim sum destination. The supermarkets stocked produce and dried goods from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland, and the strip malls filled with herbalists, bakeries, and bookstores serving a Chinese-reading clientele.
Political firsts followed the demographic ones. In 1983 Lily Lee Chen became mayor of Monterey Park, the first Chinese American woman to lead a U.S. city, after winning a city council seat the year before with a record vote. A young dentist named Judy Chu won her own council seat in 1988 and would go on to Congress. For a community barely a decade into the suburbs, that was a remarkably fast climb to a seat at the table.
The Change
Rapid change brought friction. Some longtime white residents felt their town slipping out from under them, and the resentment crystallized around language. Through the mid and late 1980s, factions on the city council pushed to make English the official language and to require English on business signs, and for a stretch foreign-language books were pulled from the public library.
The most vocal figure was councilman and later mayor Barry Hatch, associated with a slow-growth residents’ association, who cast immigrants as people who had come only to make money. The English-only campaign ultimately failed. A coalition that included Lily Lee Chen, Judy Chu, and a locally formed harmony committee pushed back, and voters turned Hatch out of office, defeating him in every precinct. The episode left scars, but the city stayed Chinese and kept growing more so.
As Monterey Park filled, the community spread east across the San Gabriel Valley. Newer and often wealthier arrivals moved into Alhambra, Rosemead, San Gabriel, Arcadia, Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, and Walnut, each becoming its own node in a suburban Chinese world that now stretched for miles. Monterey Park had been the launch pad. The valley became the destination, much as the Vietnamese built Little Saigon in Westminster a county over.
The Landmarks of Chinese Monterey Park
Mandarin Realty (Monterey Park). The firm Frederic Hsieh founded in the 1970s to sell suburban houses to immigrant buyers still operates in the city it helped transform. It is less a tourist site than a living footnote, the office where a single realtor’s wager on the San Gabriel Valley quietly came true.
Ocean Star Seafood, Atlantic Boulevard. When its cavernous, 900-seat room opened in 1982, Ocean Star set the template for the weekend dim sum ritual, all wheeled carts, wobbly Lazy Susans, and chicken feet under bamboo lids. It closed in 2019, one of several grand Cantonese halls to fade, but for a generation it was where Monterey Park Sundays happened.
NBC Seafood, 701 W. Garvey Avenue. A classic San Gabriel Valley banquet hall, NBC kept the cart-pushing dim sum tradition alive while flashier rivals closed, its aunties steering steaming trolleys between round tables. It remains a touchstone for families who measure the years in lotus-leaf rice and har gow.
Empress Harbor Seafood, Atlantic and Garvey. Opened in 1988 on the upper floor of the Atlantic Place mini-mall at the city’s busiest corner, Empress Harbor was a fixture of weekend banquets and wedding lunches for three decades. Its 2019 closing, alongside Ocean Star’s, marked the end of an era for the old guard of seafood palaces.
99 Ranch Market, 771 W. Garvey Avenue. The chain that became shorthand for the Asian American supermarket began in 1984 in Westminster under Taiwanese-born founder Roger Chen, its name a play on the Mandarin word for longevity. Its busy Monterey Park store, near the Atlantic and Garvey crossroads, still anchors a plaza where you can buy groceries, herbs, and a whole roast duck in a single stop.
Wing Hop Fung, 725 W. Garvey Avenue. A few doors from 99 Ranch, this long-running emporium deals in fine tea, ginseng, dried seafood, and Chinese herbs, its counters lined with glass jars and tea sets. Still open, it is the kind of shop where an older customer can describe an ailment and walk out with a paper bag of remedies.
Downtown Garvey Avenue, between Garfield and Alhambra Avenues. Each winter this stretch closes to traffic for the city’s Lunar New Year Festival, which in its current downtown form has run since 2008, with lion dancers, food booths, and crowds in red. It is the one weekend the whole community spills into the street at once.
Where the Monterey Park Chinese Came From
The first and defining wave came from Taiwan, families with money and education leaving political uncertainty in the 1970s and 1980s, the people Hsieh’s ads in Taipei spoke to directly. They were soon joined by Cantonese-speaking immigrants from Hong Kong, many uneasy about the territory’s scheduled 1997 handover to China, who brought with them the seafood-palace and dim sum culture that came to define the city’s tables.
From the 1990s onward the mix shifted again toward the mainland, with newcomers from Guangdong, Fujian, and northern provinces, and the soundscape of the streets tilted from Cantonese toward Mandarin. The result is not one Chinese community but several layered atop each other, a small map of the wider Chinese world. It is a suburban counterpart to the older downtown enclaves chronicled in San Francisco’s Chinatown and Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Monterey Park Today
Monterey Park is still a majority-Asian city, roughly two-thirds Asian and very largely Chinese, and it remains the recognized heart of the San Gabriel Valley’s Chinese world. But it is aging. The median age sits in the mid-forties, more than a fifth of residents are over 65, and the pioneering Taiwanese arrivals of the 1970s are now grandparents whose American-born children and grandchildren have often moved on to other suburbs.
That older generation is part of what makes the city feel rooted, and it is part of what made one night so cruel. On January 21, 2023, after an all-day Lunar New Year festival, a 72-year-old gunman opened fire at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio, killing eleven people, most of them older adults at a holiday dance. A young man named Brandon Tsay disarmed the attacker at a second studio in nearby Alhambra, almost certainly preventing more deaths. The community grieved publicly and held its festival again the following year.
What endures is the long work of building. For fifty years the Chinese in Monterey Park turned a white bedroom suburb into the place where Chinese America learned it could thrive outside the old downtown Chinatowns, the way an earlier generation made Little Tokyo across town. The seafood palaces may dim and the first wave may grey, but the supermarkets, the herbalists, and the lion dancers carry it forward, and the next chapter is still being written one storefront at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Chinese immigrants settle in Monterey Park?
The Chinese in Monterey Park were drawn there by a deliberate marketing campaign in the 1970s, led by realtor Frederic Hsieh, who advertised the suburb in Taiwan and Hong Kong as a “Chinese Beverly Hills.” Loosened U.S. immigration law and political uncertainty in Taiwan supplied a willing audience, and chain migration did the rest as early buyers brought over relatives and friends.
Is Monterey Park still a Chinese community today?
Yes. Monterey Park remains a majority-Asian city, roughly two-thirds Asian and predominantly Chinese, and it is still seen as the symbolic capital of the San Gabriel Valley’s Chinese world. The community is aging and some younger families have moved to neighboring suburbs, but the Chinese in Monterey Park continue to anchor the city’s business and civic life.
What are the most famous Chinese landmarks and restaurants in Monterey Park?
Longtime favorites include the dim sum and Cantonese seafood halls along Atlantic Boulevard and Garvey Avenue, such as NBC Seafood and the now-closed Ocean Star and Empress Harbor. The 99 Ranch Market and Wing Hop Fung tea and herb emporium near the Atlantic and Garvey corner remain everyday landmarks.
Where in China and Taiwan did Monterey Park’s Chinese come from?
The first major wave came from Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by Cantonese-speaking immigrants from Hong Kong, especially before the 1997 handover. From the 1990s onward, more arrivals came from mainland China, including Guangdong and Fujian, shifting the dominant language on the streets from Cantonese toward Mandarin.
When did Chinese residents first arrive in Monterey Park?
Chinese residents began arriving in meaningful numbers in the early 1970s, after realtor Frederic Hsieh settled in the city around 1972 and started marketing it to Asian immigrants. The Asian share of the population rose from about fifteen percent in 1970 to a majority by the 1990 census, the period when Monterey Park became known as “Little Taipei.”
Every neighborhood like this began with a single family deciding to stay. If your own roots trace back to a place that shaped who you are, your story deserves to be remembered with the same care.