Drive east on the 10 Freeway past Alhambra and Rosemead, past the dim sum palaces of San Gabriel, and the San Gabriel Valley keeps unfolding. By the time you reach West Covina, nineteen miles out from downtown Los Angeles, the hills rise and the lots widen. This is where many Chinese families came when the older suburban Chinatowns filled up: not to start the story, but to inherit it. The Chinese in West Covina are the eastern edge of one of the largest Chinese suburban migrations in American history.
The Place
West Covina sits in the east San Gabriel Valley, a city of roughly 109,000 people spread across sixteen square miles of low hills and freeway-fed neighbourhoods. It was incorporated in 1923, an agricultural town of citrus and walnut groves that exploded into a suburb between 1950 and 1960, when its population grew by more than a thousand per cent.
For decades it was a classic postwar bedroom community. Then the demographics of the valley around it shifted, and West Covina shifted with them. By the 2020 census the city was about 30 per cent Asian, a figure that would have been almost unimaginable to its first mayors.
It is a layered place. The south side is famously Filipino, home to one of Southern California’s largest Filipino communities. The story told here is a different one, running alongside it: the Chinese and Taiwanese families who pushed east out of Monterey Park and never looked back.
How It Became Chinese
To understand the Chinese in West Covina, you have to start a dozen miles to the west, in Monterey Park.
The first suburban Chinatown
In the 1970s, Monterey Park became something new in America: not a downtown Chinatown of laundries and tenements, but a suburb marketed to overseas buyers as the “Chinese Beverly Hills.” Affluent immigrants, many from Taiwan, bought ranch houses with two-car garages and good schools. It became known as the first suburban Chinatown.
The arrivals came in overlapping waves. The 1965 Immigration Act had reopened the door. Behind it came ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam, professional and business families from Taiwan, and, by the late 1980s and 1990s, a growing stream from mainland China.
The eastward drift
Monterey Park could not hold them all. In 1988 the city passed a building moratorium, a response to anxieties about overdevelopment, and the momentum spilled outward. Chinese residents and businesses moved into neighbouring Alhambra and Rosemead, then kept going.
The community spread north into San Gabriel, Arcadia, and Temple City, and southeast into Hacienda Heights and Rowland Heights. From there it pressed further east still, into Walnut, Diamond Bar, Chino Hills, and West Covina.
West Covina sat at the right distance. It was far enough east to be affordable when San Marino and Arcadia had become expensive, close enough to the older enclaves that a family could still drive back for a wedding banquet or a temple festival on a Sunday afternoon. The freeways made it possible to live in West Covina and keep one foot in the old neighbourhood.
That distance also shaped the character of the move. People who chose West Covina were rarely fresh off the plane. More often they were families who had already spent years in the inner valley, who had saved, watched their children start school, and decided they wanted a bigger lot and a quieter street. West Covina was an upgrade as much as an arrival, the place you moved to after you had found your footing further west.
Taiwan, then the mainland
The earliest Chinese families to settle in West Covina in numbers were heavily Taiwanese, part of the same professional cohort that had built Monterey Park and Arcadia. They were engineers, accountants, small-business owners, doctors. They valued schools above almost everything, and they chose West Covina the way they chose any address: by the reputation of its classrooms.
The 2010 figures captured a community in transition. Among West Covina’s foreign-born residents, mainland China was the single largest country of origin, with Taiwan close behind. Vietnam, source of many ethnic Chinese refugees, was a major presence too. The Taiwanese pioneers were being joined, and in places overtaken, by a newer mainland Chinese immigration.
What did not change was the pattern of arrival. People came to a city where someone they knew already lived, where the supermarket already stocked the right soy sauce, where a cousin could recommend a piano teacher and a tax preparer who spoke Mandarin. Chain migration, the quiet engine of every diaspora, did its work here as surely as it had in Monterey Park.
Building the everyday city
The infrastructure followed the families. Asian grocery anchors opened along the city’s commercial corridors. Hong Kong Plaza on South Glendora Avenue became a hub of restaurants, a food court, and a market. Dim sum houses, dumpling shops, and bakeries clustered where there had once been only American chains.
By the 2020s the city had a fully developed Chinese commercial life of its own. A family in West Covina no longer needed to drive west to San Gabriel for groceries, herbs, banquet halls, or after-school tutoring. The east valley had become its own world.
The Landmarks
Hong Kong Plaza, 989 S Glendora Avenue. This commercial plaza became one of West Covina’s anchors of Chinese daily life, gathering Asian restaurants, a food court with regional tastes, and a market under one roof. For many families it is the default Saturday stop, the place where errands and a bowl of noodles happen in the same trip.
SF Supermarket, 3650 Nogales Street. The Shun Fat chain opened this West Covina branch in 2022, bringing a full Chinese-Vietnamese grocery to the city’s eastern edge. Aisles of fresh seafood, produce, and pantry staples mean a household can stock a week of home cooking without leaving town.
Dim Sum King Master, 979 S Glendora Avenue. A neighbourhood dim sum house near Hong Kong Plaza, it serves the carts-and-tea ritual that for many immigrant families is the closest thing to a shared weekly meal. Three generations at one round table is a common sight on weekend mornings.
Tian You Feng Dumpling House, 1042 Plaza Drive. Sitting beside the city’s main retail district, this dumpling specialist has become a fixture for handmade Northern Chinese dumplings, a reminder that the community here is not monolithic but stretches across China’s culinary regions.
Sheng Hui Dim Sum, 2889 Valley Boulevard. On the busy Valley Boulevard corridor that runs the spine of the San Gabriel Valley’s Chinese commerce, this dim sum restaurant ties West Covina into the older food culture of the cities to its west.
Plaza West Covina, 112 Plaza Drive. The regional mall that opened in 1975 was once the symbol of West Covina’s all-American suburban prosperity. Today its parking lots and food court are as much a Chinese American gathering place as anyone else’s, a quiet measure of how thoroughly the city has changed.
West Covina Civic Center. The city’s headquarters building stands as the institutional heart of a community whose council, schools, and commissions now reflect a population that is nearly a third Asian, a long way from the town’s walnut-grove beginnings.
Where They Came From
The Chinese of West Covina trace back to three broad origins, layered over half a century. The earliest and most influential were Taiwanese, professional families who had first landed in Monterey Park and Arcadia and then moved east as those cities filled and prices climbed.
Behind them came mainland Chinese immigrants, especially from the 1990s onward, who by 2010 formed the single largest foreign-born group in the city. And woven through both were ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam, who arrived after 1975 carrying a Cantonese-inflected culture that shaped the valley’s restaurants and markets.
What united them was less a single home province than a single calculation: West Covina offered space, schools, and an established Chinese community close enough to feel like home. They came, in large part, because others like them were already there.
West Covina Today
West Covina today is a city without a single dominant story, and that is exactly the point. It is majority Latino, heavily Filipino on its south side, and roughly 30 per cent Asian overall, with Chinese and Taiwanese families forming a large and visible share of that figure. No one group owns the place.
For the Chinese community, the city represents a particular kind of arrival: the outer suburb, the second or third address, the place you move when the first wave of immigration has already done the hardest work. The families here are often a generation removed from the struggle, with children moving through the West Covina Unified and Rowland school systems and on to the University of California campuses.
It is, in the most ordinary sense, settled. The dumpling houses and dim sum carts, the Mandarin heard in the supermarket aisles, the round tables full on a Sunday morning: none of it announces itself. It is simply how the east San Gabriel Valley lives now, the far end of a migration that started in one small suburb and never stopped moving east.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Chinese community in West Covina, California?
West Covina was about 30 per cent Asian at the 2020 census, out of roughly 109,000 residents. Chinese and Taiwanese families form a large share of that Asian population, part of the broader eastward spread of the San Gabriel Valley Chinese community.
Why did Chinese families move to West Covina?
The Chinese in West Covina largely arrived as the older suburban enclaves of Monterey Park, Alhambra, and Arcadia filled up and grew expensive. West Covina offered more space and good schools while staying close to the established community, so families pushed east along the 10 Freeway.
Are the Chinese in West Covina mostly from Taiwan or mainland China?
Both. The earliest settlers were heavily Taiwanese professionals who moved east from Monterey Park and Arcadia. By 2010, mainland China had become the single largest country of origin among the city’s foreign-born residents, with Taiwan close behind and a significant ethnic Chinese Vietnamese presence as well.
Where do Chinese residents in West Covina shop and eat?
Hong Kong Plaza on South Glendora Avenue and SF Supermarket on Nogales Street are major anchors, alongside dim sum and dumpling houses such as Dim Sum King Master and Tian You Feng. The Valley Boulevard corridor also ties the city into the wider San Gabriel Valley Chinese food scene.
How is West Covina different from other San Gabriel Valley Chinese communities?
West Covina sits at the eastern edge of the migration, further out than Monterey Park or San Gabriel and more residential. It is also far more mixed, with a large Filipino community and a Latino majority, so the Chinese community shares the city rather than defining it.
When did the Chinese community in West Covina form?
It grew mainly from the 1980s and 1990s onward, after Monterey Park’s 1988 building moratorium helped push residents and businesses eastward. West Covina’s Chinese commercial life matured through the 2000s and 2010s, with newer anchors like SF Supermarket opening as recently as 2022.
If your family’s story passed through West Covina, or any of the places Chinese families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a first apartment in Monterey Park to a house in the hills of the east San Gabriel Valley, to wherever you are now.