Drive into the Diamond Jamboree shopping centre off Jamboree Road on a Saturday afternoon and the car park is full long before the shops are. Families queue out of the door at a bakery that smells of sea salt and brioche, teenagers hover over bowls of shaved snow, and the conversations around you carry the soft, rounded cadence of Taiwanese Mandarin and Hokkien. The Taiwanese in Irvine did not arrive looking for a Chinatown. They came for the schools, the laboratories and the quiet, and they built one of the largest Taiwanese American communities in the country almost without anyone noticing.
The Place
Irvine is a city that was designed before it was lived in. The Irvine Company, a landholder dating to 1864, commissioned the architect William Pereira to draw a master plan for the old Irvine Ranch, and his blueprint was finished in 1960. That same year, plans were approved to build the University of California’s ninth campus on land the company sold to the state for a single dollar.
UC Irvine opened in October 1965, and the city itself was incorporated on 28 December 1971. Everything about it was deliberate: villages separated by greenbelts, traffic routed away from front doors, a grid of low office parks that would later fill with technology and biotech firms.
It is affluent, orderly and, by reputation, slightly antiseptic. It is also one of the safest large cities in America and home to schools that consistently rank among California’s best. For a particular kind of immigrant family, that combination was not a drawback. It was the entire point.
How It Became Taiwanese
A migration of professionals
The Taiwanese story in America is, more than most, a story of credentials. Between 1984 and 1999, roughly 200,000 Taiwanese immigrated to the United States, and the overwhelming majority who listed an occupation were professionals, technicians or managers. They arrived already educated, often with graduate degrees, and they were better educated on average than both the native-born and other immigrant populations.
This was migration shaped by the visa categories that rewarded skill. More than half of employed Taiwanese-born men worked in management and finance, in information technology, or in science and engineering. These were doctors, electrical engineers, pharmacists and business owners, and they could afford to choose where they raised their children.
Why Orange County, and why Irvine
The earliest and largest Taiwanese settlement in Southern California formed in the San Gabriel Valley, in Monterey Park and later Rowland Heights and Hacienda Heights. Those places became the cultural anchor for the wider Chinese-speaking diaspora, and many Taiwanese families’ American story begins there before it reaches the coast.
Orange County drew the next wave south. As Taiwanese professionals prospered through the 1980s and 1990s, they followed work into the technology corridors of Irvine and the surrounding cities, and they followed the schools. Today over 200,000 Taiwanese Americans live in the Greater Los Angeles area, including Orange County, accounting for more than a third of the entire Taiwanese American population.
The school effect
If one force concentrated Taiwanese families in Irvine specifically, it was the Irvine Unified School District. Its schools rank in the top tier of California for maths and reading proficiency, and the district’s student body is now more than half Asian. Word travelled through Taiwanese networks the way it always does, family to family, that a particular set of streets fed into a particular set of schools.
Houses in those attendance zones commanded a premium, and Taiwanese parents, like Korean and mainland Chinese parents beside them, were willing to pay it. Education was not one factor among several. For many it was the reason the family had crossed the Pacific in the first place.
The Landmarks
85C Bakery Cafe, Diamond Jamboree, 2750 Alton Parkway. This was the one that started the rush. The Taiwanese chain opened its first United States store here in November 2008, and the queues outside became a local legend. Its sea salt coffee and rows of cheap, glossy pastries turned a strip-mall bakery into the flagship of an American empire, and into a Saturday ritual for Taiwanese Irvine.
Class 302, 13252 Jamboree Road. Named for a classroom and fitted out like one, with wooden desks and chalkboard menus, Class 302 serves the food of a Taipei after-school snack run. Mango shaved snow under condensed milk, popcorn chicken, sizzling peppercorn beef and bowls of spicy beef noodle soup arrive at tables of students who could be in Taiwan or Tustin without changing a thing.
Diamond Jamboree Shopping Center, 2700 to 2750 Alton Parkway. The plaza itself is the landmark. More than twenty restaurants pack a single corner, Taiwanese, Chinese, Korean and Japanese side by side, anchored by an H Mart and a sprawl of boba windows. It is the closest thing Irvine has to a town square for its Asian residents, a place built for crowds and rarely without them.
99 Ranch Market, Heritage Plaza, Walnut Avenue. The largest Asian supermarket chain in America was founded in 1984 by Roger H. Chen, a Taiwanese immigrant who studied agriculture and business at National Taiwan University before noticing the gap on American grocery shelves. Its Irvine stores stock the soy sauce, the dried goods and the frozen dumplings of home, and the company itself is a monument to Taiwanese enterprise in California.
University of California, Irvine, campus off Campus Drive. The university that justified the city draws Taiwanese students and faculty in numbers, and its engineering and medical programmes feed directly into the professions that built the local community. For many families the campus is both an employer and an aspiration, the place they hope their children will reach without leaving home.
The Irvine Global Village Festival, Bill Barber Memorial Park. Each autumn the city’s annual multicultural festival gives the Taiwanese community a public stage. Taiwanese American Professionals of Orange County has co-hosted there alongside the Miss Taiwanese American pageant, raising the community’s profile in a city where it is large but seldom loud.
University High School, 4771 Campus Drive. Established in 1970, “Uni” is one of the most sought-after public high schools in Orange County, ranked among the best in California, with an average SAT near 1400. Its catchment is one of the addresses Taiwanese families chase, and its graduating classes are a fair portrait of who has made Irvine home.
Where They Came From
The Taiwanese of Irvine did not come from a single town. They came from Taipei and its suburbs, from the manufacturing belt around Hsinchu and Taichung, from Kaohsiung in the south, from across the island. What they shared was less a hometown than a moment: the decades after 1980, when Taiwan’s economy was booming, its universities were producing more graduates than its job market could absorb, and the United States was opening its doors to skilled migrants.
Many arrived by way of the laboratory and the lecture hall. A graduate place at an American university was a common first step, and a science or engineering degree was a common passport. Some moved restlessly between Silicon Valley and Hsinchu Science Park as the two economies entwined, building careers that straddled the Pacific.
It is worth drawing a line here, because it matters to the families themselves. The Taiwanese are not interchangeable with the mainland Chinese who also fill Irvine’s plazas and schools, even though the two communities share a written language and a great deal of food. Taiwan’s separate history, its democracy, its dialects and its distinct sense of identity travel with its emigrants, and in Irvine that identity is quietly but firmly its own.
The journey rarely ran straight to the coast. For a great many families the first American home was the San Gabriel Valley, in cities like Monterey Park, before a better job or a better school district pulled them south to Orange County. Irvine was often the second or third address, the one chosen on purpose.
Irvine Today
Walk Irvine now and the Taiwanese presence is everywhere and nowhere at once. There is no gate, no arch, no single street that announces itself. There is instead a bakery franchise born here, a supermarket chain founded by a Taiwanese immigrant, a shopping plaza that functions as a community hall, and schools whose corridors carry the weight of a thousand family hopes.
Irvine counts a Taiwanese population in the thousands, among the largest of any city in California, and its Asian residents now make up close to half the city. The community organises through groups like Taiwanese American Professionals of Orange County, runs boba workshops and dumpling nights, and stages itself once a year at the Global Village Festival.
The geography spills outward, too. Families move easily between Irvine, Tustin and the older Taiwanese strongholds in Cerritos and Rowland Heights, and the boundaries between these communities are social rather than physical. A grandparent in Rowland Heights, a son’s family in Irvine and a cousin in the San Gabriel Valley is an ordinary arrangement.
What the Taiwanese built in Irvine is a particular kind of immigrant success: prosperous, professional, oriented entirely toward the next generation. It is a community that measured its arrival not in storefronts but in test scores, and that found, in a city designed on a drawing board, exactly the future it had been looking for.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Taiwanese Americans live in Irvine?
Irvine is home to roughly 7,000 Taiwanese residents, making it one of the largest Taiwanese American populations of any city in California, behind only Los Angeles and San Jose. The wider Greater Los Angeles area, including Orange County, houses more than 200,000 Taiwanese Americans.
Why did Taiwanese families settle in Irvine specifically?
The main draws were the schools and the work. Irvine Unified School District ranks among the best in California, and the city’s technology and biotech corridors offered careers for the engineers, doctors and business owners who made up much of the Taiwanese migration. Safety and affluence reinforced the choice.
What is the difference between Taiwanese and Chinese residents in Irvine?
Both communities are large in Irvine and share a written language and much of their cuisine, but they are distinct. Taiwanese Americans carry Taiwan’s separate history, dialects, democratic culture and sense of identity, which remain meaningful to families even as they live and shop alongside mainland Chinese neighbours.
Where do Taiwanese residents in Irvine eat and gather?
The Diamond Jamboree shopping centre off Alton Parkway is the unofficial hub, with 85C Bakery Cafe, Class 302 and dozens of other Asian restaurants and boba shops. The 99 Ranch Market and H Mart supermarkets supply the kitchens, and the annual Irvine Global Village Festival is a community gathering point.
When did the Taiwanese community in Irvine form?
Most arrived during the wave of skilled Taiwanese migration from the 1980s onward, often after a first stop in the San Gabriel Valley. The opening of 85C Bakery’s first United States store in Irvine in 2008 marked the community’s growing visibility in the city.
How is the Taiwanese community in Irvine connected to other areas?
Strongly. Families move easily between Irvine, Tustin, Cerritos and the older Taiwanese strongholds of Rowland Heights and the San Gabriel Valley. Many Irvine families began their American lives in those earlier communities before relocating to Orange County for work or schools.
If your family’s story passed through Irvine, or any of the places the Taiwanese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Taipei to Irvine, to wherever you are now.
Read more in our Roots series: the Chinese in Monterey Park, the Persians in Irvine, the Vietnamese in Little Saigon, the Koreans in Koreatown and the Japanese in Sawtelle. For background, see the Migration Policy Institute and an overview of Taiwanese Americans.