On a Saturday morning along Skokie Boulevard, the queue for soup dumplings forms before the lunch rush, and the conversations in the line drift easily between English and Mandarin. The Chinese in Northbrook are not a story of one street or one shopfront. They are woven through a leafy North Shore village that, for most of its history, was known for wide lots, good schools and the films of a local boy named John Hughes. Over the past three decades, that village has quietly become one of the most Chinese suburbs in the Chicago region.
The Place
Northbrook sits at the northern edge of Cook County, about 25 miles from downtown Chicago, on the band of affluent suburbs collectively known as the North Shore. It is a place of curving residential streets, mature oaks and large single-family homes, the sort of suburb where the public schools are the main civic institution.
The village was incorporated in 1901 as Shermerville, named for Frederick Schermer, who donated land for its first railway station. In 1923 residents voted to rename it Northbrook, after the West Fork of the North Branch of the Chicago River that runs through it, partly to shed the rougher reputation the old name had acquired.
After the Second World War, Northbrook grew quickly, its population climbing from 3,319 in 1950 to 30,735 by 1980 as subdivisions filled the farmland. Today it is home to roughly 34,600 people, and prosperous: the kind of address chosen by families who measure a town first by its classrooms.
How It Became Chinese
For most of the twentieth century, Chinese Chicago meant Chinatown, the dense enclave on the Near South Side that grew up around Cermak Road and Wentworth Avenue. The North Shore was somewhere else entirely, a Protestant and later Jewish commuter belt with little visible Asian presence.
What changed Northbrook was not Chinatown spilling north. It was a separate, later migration of educated, Mandarin-speaking professionals who arrived already credentialed, already employed, and looking for the best schools their incomes could buy.
The professional wave
From the late 1970s onward, the pattern that reshaped Northbrook was the arrival of Chinese immigrants who had come to the United States for graduate study. Many earned master’s and doctoral degrees in science, engineering and medicine, then took jobs in the laboratories, hospitals and corporate research operations that ringed the northern suburbs.
These were not chain migrants following relatives into an established quarter. They were individual families making individual calculations, and the calculation almost always ran through education. Where the schools were strongest, the Chinese families came.
The school equation
Few schools in Illinois ranked higher than the ones serving Northbrook. Glenbrook North High School, founded in 1953, has long sat among the top public high schools in the state. It posts a graduation rate around 97 per cent, places among the top five per cent of Illinois schools for test scores, and has been recognised nationally for its STEM programme.
For a generation of Chinese parents who had themselves climbed through fiercely competitive examination systems in China and Taiwan, a town like Northbrook offered something specific and legible: a public school that behaved like a private one, paid for through the property tax. A house in Northbrook was, in effect, tuition.
That single fact did more to draw Chinese families than any restaurant, temple or grocery ever could. The community formed not around an enclave but around a school district.
From a handful to a sixth of the village
The growth was steady rather than sudden. Across the Chicago metropolitan area, the Chinese population in the suburbs grew faster than in the city itself through the late twentieth century, and the North Shore captured a disproportionate share of the most highly educated arrivals.
By the 2020s the numbers were striking. Asian residents now make up about 16.2 per cent of Northbrook, well above the Illinois average of under 6 per cent, and a large part of that share is Chinese. More than a fifth of the village, around 20.7 per cent, is foreign-born. The greater Chicago area now counts well over 150,000 people of Chinese descent, the eighth-largest such community among American metropolitan areas, and Northbrook holds a visible slice of it.
A community without a Chinatown
What makes Northbrook distinctive is that this growth never produced an enclave. There is no Chinese gate, no concentration of red lanterns, no single block that reads as a quarter. The Chinese presence is dispersed through ordinary subdivisions, expressed in PTA meetings, weekend language classes and the produce aisles of suburban supermarkets.
It is a diaspora of the well-resourced, and it wears its identity lightly in public while holding it firmly at home.
The Landmarks
Serious Sanji, 794 Skokie Boulevard. A modern Chinese spot known for soup dumplings and bubble tea, it has become a Saturday-afternoon fixture for families in the area. The crowd skews young and bilingual, the sort of place where teenagers from Glenbrook North gather over boba and parents catch up over dumplings.
BinHai, 757 Pfingsten Road. A neighbourhood Chinese restaurant tucked into a Northbrook strip, BinHai is the kind of unflashy kitchen that locals defend fiercely. It serves the everyday food a dispersed community needs: a reliable table close to home rather than a destination across the county.
P.F. Chang’s, 1819 Lake Cook Road. Sitting near Northbrook Court, this is the mainstream, Americanised face of Chinese dining on the North Shore. It matters less for authenticity than for visibility, a reminder of how thoroughly Chinese food has entered the suburban mainstream that surrounds the immigrant community.
Lao Sze Chuan, 9434 Skokie Boulevard, Skokie. Just south of the village line, this Sichuan restaurant is part of a well-known Chicago group and draws Northbrook diners hungry for the numbing heat of twice-cooked pork and chilli chicken. For many North Shore families it is the nearest taste of serious regional cooking.
Northbrook Court, 1515 Lake Cook Road. The village’s landmark shopping mall, opened in 1976 with Neiman Marcus among its anchors, is also a piece of film history, featured in John Hughes’s Weird Science. For Chinese families it functions as the everyday commons of the affluent suburb, the place where a North Shore childhood is partly spent.
Xilin Northshore Chinese School, Oakton Community College, 7701 North Lincoln Avenue, Skokie. Founded in 1995 as the first volunteer-run Chinese school in Chicago’s northern suburbs, Xilin has grown to serve hundreds of families. Each weekend it gives North Shore children the Mandarin, calligraphy and cultural grounding their weekday schools do not.
Chicago Northwest Suburban Chinese School, 1000 South Quentin Road, Palatine. Established in 1981 and accredited by the Illinois State Board of Education, it teaches Chinese from toddler classes through high school. For decades it has been one of the institutions where suburban Chinese families, Northbrook’s among them, keep the language alive across generations.
Where They Came From
The Chinese of Northbrook trace their origins to two broad streams. The earlier arrivals often came from Taiwan, part of the wave of students who crossed the Pacific for American graduate schools in the 1970s and 1980s and stayed for careers in science and medicine. Their Mandarin, their professional networks and their emphasis on education set the template the community still follows.
The later and larger stream came from mainland China, accelerating from the 1990s as China opened and its universities began sending huge cohorts abroad. These families arrived from major cities and provinces across the country, typically with advanced degrees already in hand and corporate or academic jobs waiting.
What unites both streams is selection by education. Unlike the labourers and restaurateurs who built historic Chinatowns, the Chinese who chose Northbrook were filtered through universities and skilled-visa pathways. That is why the community looks the way it does: suburban, prosperous, and organised around its children’s schooling rather than around a commercial core.
Northbrook Today
Today the Chinese presence in Northbrook is most visible at the margins of ordinary suburban life. It is the Mandarin overheard at the supermarket, the queue at a dumpling counter, the carloads of children driven to weekend Chinese school in neighbouring towns, the strong representation in advanced maths classes at Glenbrook North.
It is also a community still maturing. A first generation that arrived as graduate students is now raising, and in many cases has already raised, an American-born second generation that moves fluently between worlds. Those children grow up bilingual when their parents work at it, fully suburban in their habits, and increasingly visible in the civic life of the village.
Honesty requires noting what Northbrook is not. It is not a cultural capital with a Chinatown’s density of institutions, and families here often drive south to Chinatown or west to the larger Asian groceries and restaurant rows for the deepest immersion. Northbrook offers the schools, the safety and the lawns; the cultural core lies elsewhere, a short motorway journey away.
For comparison, the same forces shaped the Chinese community in nearby Schaumburg, Illinois, another suburb that drew educated arrivals to its schools and edge-city jobs. Northbrook also sits on the same North Shore as the long-established Jewish community in Northbrook and the storied one in Glencoe, Illinois, layered traditions sharing the same prized school districts.
The pattern is a national one. Affluent, high-performing suburbs from McKinney, Texas to Clarksville, Maryland have drawn the same professional Chinese migration for the same reason, and the great technology hubs like San Jose, California show where the story can lead. Northbrook is Chicago’s chapter of that larger American book.
For more on the broader migration that fed these suburbs, see the history of Chinese Americans in Chicago and the U.S. News profile of Glenbrook North High School.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Chinese people live in Northbrook, Illinois?
Northbrook has a population of roughly 34,600, of whom about 16.2 per cent are Asian, well above the Illinois average. A large share of that Asian population is Chinese, making the Chinese in Northbrook one of the more substantial Chinese communities in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago.
Why did Chinese families settle in Northbrook?
The main draw was education. Northbrook’s public schools, led by Glenbrook North High School, rank among the best in Illinois, and educated Chinese immigrant families chose the village to give their children access to those schools. The Chinese in Northbrook formed a community organised around a school district rather than a traditional ethnic enclave.
Is there a Chinatown in Northbrook?
No. Unlike Chicago’s historic Chinatown on the Near South Side, Northbrook has no concentrated Chinese quarter. The community is dispersed through ordinary suburban neighbourhoods, and families often travel to Chinatown or to larger Asian shopping areas for the deepest cultural and culinary experiences.
Where do Chinese families in Northbrook learn Mandarin?
Many attend weekend Chinese schools in neighbouring suburbs, such as the Xilin Northshore Chinese School, which holds classes at Oakton Community College in Skokie, and the Chicago Northwest Suburban Chinese School in Palatine. These volunteer-founded schools teach language and culture to children who attend mainstream public schools during the week.
Where did Northbrook’s Chinese residents originally come from?
They came in two main streams: earlier arrivals from Taiwan who came as graduate students from the 1970s and 1980s, and a larger later wave from mainland China that grew from the 1990s. Both groups were largely highly educated professionals who entered through universities and skilled-work pathways.
What are good Chinese restaurants in Northbrook?
Options within the village include Serious Sanji on Skokie Boulevard for soup dumplings and bubble tea, BinHai on Pfingsten Road, and P.F. Chang’s near Northbrook Court. Just south in Skokie, Lao Sze Chuan offers serious Sichuan cooking that draws diners from across the North Shore.
If your family’s story passed through Northbrook, or any of the places Chinese families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a graduate-school arrival in Taipei or Beijing, to a house chosen for the Glenbrook North catchment, to wherever you are now.