Before Cupertino became shorthand for Apple and a top-of-the-table school district, it was a quiet valley of apricot and prune orchards. The transformation into one of America’s most striking suburbs owes a great deal to the Taiwanese in Cupertino, the engineers and entrepreneurs who arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, raised families on these streets, and helped make this corner of Santa Clara County a Silicon Valley Asian hub.
The Place
Cupertino sits at the western edge of Silicon Valley, tucked against the foothills below Stevens Creek, about an hour south of San Francisco. It was incorporated on 10 October 1955 as Santa Clara County’s thirteenth city, named after Arroyo San Jose de Cupertino, the creek a cartographer for the Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza had christened for Saint Joseph of Cupertino.
For decades it was farmland and tract housing. Then Apple planted its headquarters here in 1977, De Anza College opened in 1967, and the orchards gave way to one of the wealthiest small cities in the country, with a median household income well above $160,000.
Today Cupertino is more than 70 per cent Asian American, with over half its residents foreign born. The Taiwanese arrived early, and their imprint, on the schools, the shopping plazas, the bakeries, runs deeper than the numbers alone suggest.
How It Became Taiwanese
The story begins not in Cupertino but in the lecture halls of Taiwan’s engineering universities. From the 1960s onward, a generation of Taiwanese students came to the United States for advanced degrees in science and engineering, drawn by graduate programmes at Stanford, Berkeley and beyond.
The engineers arrive
Many stayed. Taiwan’s brightest technical graduates found that the semiconductor and personal computer industries rising in Santa Clara County wanted exactly what they had trained for. They took jobs at chip firms and hardware companies, and by the 1980s a recognisable Taiwanese professional class had formed across the valley.
The roll call of Taiwanese Silicon Valley figures is remarkable. Jerry Yang, born in Taipei in 1968, co-founded Yahoo while a Stanford graduate student. Jensen Huang, Taiwan born, co-founded Nvidia. Steve Chen, also from Taiwan, co-founded YouTube. These were the visible peaks of a much broader migration of talent.
Why Cupertino specifically
Engineers with young families looked for two things above all: safe streets and excellent schools. Cupertino, sitting within the Fremont Union High School District and the Cupertino Union School District, offered both in abundance. Word travelled fast through workplace and church networks that this was the place to raise children.
Family reunification policies in the 1980s broadened the flow. The engineer who had arrived alone for a master’s degree could now sponsor parents and siblings. Households grew, multigenerational homes became common, and demand for Taiwanese groceries, restaurants and weekend language classes followed naturally.
The institutions take root
As the community matured through the 1990s, it built the scaffolding of a permanent home. Taiwanese churches and Buddhist groups organised, weekend Chinese schools opened to keep Mandarin alive in second-generation children, and professional associations such as the North America Taiwanese Engineering and Science Association gave engineers a place to network and mentor.
In 1999, the Tzu Chi Academy at Cupertino opened its doors, an offshoot of the Taiwan-founded Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation. It paired Mandarin instruction with lessons in filial piety, environmental stewardship and good deeds. Over two decades it has taught more than 3,000 children.
This Taiwanese foundation predated the larger wave of mainland Chinese settlement that would later reshape Cupertino. The two communities overlap in language and schooling but remain distinct in origin and memory, a distinction long-time residents are quick to draw. You can read more about the later arrivals in our companion piece on the Chinese in Cupertino, and about the Indian engineers who became the city’s other great immigrant story in Indians in Cupertino.
From orchards to address of choice
By the early 2000s, Cupertino’s identity had inverted. The orchards were a memory, and an address here signalled academic ambition and tech-sector success. Home prices climbed past the reach of all but the dual-income engineering household, and the Taiwanese families who had bought in the 1980s and 1990s found themselves sitting on the most coveted land in the valley.
The community also spread outward. Some moved to Saratoga, Palo Alto and Los Altos as their fortunes grew, while keeping Cupertino as a cultural anchor. The bakeries, bubble tea shops and noodle houses remained the gravitational centre.
It is worth pausing on how unusual this was. Most American immigrant neighbourhoods began with the poor and the desperate, the steerage passenger and the factory hand. The Taiwanese who built Cupertino arrived with master’s degrees and savings, bought rather than rented, and entered the professional middle class almost on landing. The result was a suburb that skipped the tenement chapter entirely and went straight to the cul-de-sac and the cram-school timetable.
The Landmarks
Cupertino Village, 10983 N Wolfe Road. Anchored by the 99 Ranch Market, this plaza is the beating heart of Asian Cupertino. Its storefronts carry traditional Chinese signage, and on weekends the parking lot fills with families collecting groceries, dumplings and milk tea. For many Taiwanese residents it is the first stop of every Saturday.
85C Bakery Cafe, Cupertino Village. The Taiwanese chain that built its reputation on sea-salt coffee and a wall of fresh-baked breads brought a taste of Taipei to Wolfe Road. The queues at weekends, the trays and tongs, the brioche and taro buns: this is comfort and homesickness in equal measure for the first generation.
Tzu Chi Academy at Cupertino. Opened in 1999, this weekend heritage school has taught Mandarin and Taiwanese-Buddhist values to thousands of children. It is where second-generation kids learn to write characters their engineer parents grew up with, and where the language is handed down rather than lost.
Southland Cafe, Cupertino. The Southland name began in Milpitas in 1997 and reached Cupertino soon after, becoming one of the valley’s elder statesmen of Taiwanese cooking. Its three-cup chicken and beef noodle soup helped set the template for what Silicon Valley expected a Taiwanese restaurant to be.
Liang’s Village, Cupertino. Descended from a family kitchen that started in the San Gabriel Valley in 1981, the Cupertino location opened in 2010 under the founder’s grandchildren, Austin, Jessica and Erica Liang. It is a study in how a Taiwanese food legacy passes from one generation to the next.
Monta Vista High School, 21840 McClellan Road. Routinely ranked among the very best public schools in California, with a student body roughly 80 per cent Asian, Monta Vista is the school the migration was built around. Generations of Taiwanese families chose Cupertino precisely so their children could walk these halls.
De Anza College, 21250 Stevens Creek Boulevard. Founded in 1967, this two-year college has been a quiet workhorse of immigrant advancement, a place where new arrivals retooled, transferred and learned English on the way to four-year degrees and tech careers.
Where They Came From
The Taiwanese of Cupertino trace overwhelmingly to the island of Taiwan, and within it to its cities: Taipei, Hsinchu, Taichung, Kaohsiung. Many came from the urban professional families that fed Taiwan’s technical universities, the National Taiwan University and National Tsing Hua University graduates who formed the spine of the migration.
The pull was the degree first and the job second. Taiwan’s own technology economy, anchored later by giants such as TSMC and Acer, grew in close conversation with Silicon Valley, and engineers moved back and forth across the Pacific. Hsinchu’s science park and Santa Clara County’s chip firms were, in a real sense, two ends of the same industry.
Santa Clara County now holds the second-largest Taiwanese American population of any county in the country, with around 20,840 residents, behind only Los Angeles County. Cupertino, small as it is, sits near the centre of that gravity. The wider San Francisco Bay Area, anchored by this county, is the second-largest Taiwanese American region in the United States, trailing only metropolitan Los Angeles.
What this population shares is less a single hometown than a single trajectory: the technical degree, the move abroad, the family that followed. That shared path, more than any village of origin, is what binds the Taiwanese of Cupertino together.
Cupertino Today
Cupertino in the 2020s is a city that long ago achieved what its early Taiwanese families came for, and is now living with the consequences. The schools remain among the best in the state, the competition inside them fierce, and the home prices that reward the original buyers now lock out the next generation of strivers.
The Taiwanese community here has aged and layered. The engineers who arrived in their twenties are grandparents now, and their American-born children, fluent in both Mandarin and the local academic pressure cooker, have scattered to colleges and careers across the country. The mainland Chinese wave that followed has become numerically larger, which makes the older Taiwanese institutions, the churches, the Tzu Chi academy, the family restaurants, all the more precious as keepers of a distinct story.
What endures is the texture of daily life the Taiwanese helped create: the 99 Ranch run, the 85C box of bread, the weekend Chinese school, the quiet pride in a child’s report card. The migration that began in a Stanford lab now reads its grandchildren bedtime stories on the same orchard land, in a town it helped invent. For the wider arc of Taiwanese settlement in California, see our pieces on the Taiwanese in Irvine and the Taiwanese in Cerritos, two Southern California communities that grew from the same currents.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did so many Taiwanese settle in Cupertino?
The Taiwanese in Cupertino came for the combination of Silicon Valley engineering jobs and some of the best public schools in California. Engineers who arrived for graduate degrees in the 1980s and 1990s chose Cupertino to raise families, and word spread through workplace and church networks that this was the place to be.
When did the Taiwanese community in Cupertino form?
The foundations were laid in the 1980s and 1990s, when Taiwanese engineers drawn by the semiconductor and personal computer industries began buying homes here. This Taiwanese settlement predated the larger mainland Chinese wave that arrived later, making it one of the earliest Asian American communities in the city.
How is the Taiwanese community different from the Chinese community in Cupertino?
Though they share Mandarin and the same top schools, the Taiwanese and mainland Chinese communities have distinct origins and histories. The Taiwanese arrived first, trace to the island of Taiwan, and built early institutions such as the Tzu Chi Academy, while the larger mainland Chinese settlement came in subsequent decades.
What are the best Taiwanese places to eat in Cupertino?
Cupertino Village on N Wolfe Road, anchored by the 99 Ranch Market, is the hub, home to the Taiwanese bakery 85C and numerous restaurants. Long-running spots such as Southland Cafe and Liang’s Village serve the beef noodle soup and three-cup chicken the valley’s Taiwanese families grew up on.
Why are Cupertino’s schools so highly ranked?
Schools such as Monta Vista High and Lynbrook High consistently rank among the top in California, driven in large part by immigrant families, including the Taiwanese in Cupertino, who prize academic achievement. Demand for these schools is a major reason home prices in the city are so high.
Where do Cupertino’s Taiwanese families come from in Taiwan?
Most trace to Taiwan’s cities, especially Taipei, Hsinchu, Taichung and Kaohsiung, and often to the urban professional families that produced the island’s engineers. The Hsinchu science park and Silicon Valley chip industry grew in close partnership, drawing talent back and forth across the Pacific.
If your family’s story passed through Cupertino, or any of the places Taiwanese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a university in Taipei or Hsinchu to a first apartment near De Anza College, to a Saturday morning at Cupertino Village, to wherever you are now.