Drive up into the Evergreen foothills on a clear morning and the whole of Silicon Valley unrolls below you, a grid of low offices and quiet cul-de-sacs running north toward the bay. Somewhere in that haze sit the headquarters where Taiwanese engineers helped build the modern chip, and in the streets between them live the families who came with them. The story of the Taiwanese in San Jose is not a story of a single street or a famous gate. It is a story of professors’ children and circuit designers, of churches that meet in borrowed halls and noodle shops in strip malls, scattered across a city so large it can hide an entire community in plain sight.
The Place
San Jose is the tenth-largest city in the United States and the unglamorous capital of Silicon Valley, the sprawling civic body to which Cupertino, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara are merely limbs. It is enormous and low, a city of single-family homes and arterial roads rather than skyline.
Its wealth came late and came from silicon. Where Santa Clara Valley once grew apricots and prunes, by the 1980s it grew semiconductors, and the engineers who designed them needed somewhere to raise children.
They found it in the eastern and southern hills, in Evergreen and Almaden Valley, where good schools, new houses and mountain views drew a generation of immigrant professionals who could finally afford them.
How It Became Taiwanese
The Taiwanese did not arrive in San Jose as labourers or refugees. They arrived with degrees.
The students who never went home
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the old national-origins quotas that had kept most Asians out of the United States for decades. In its place came a system that favoured the skilled, and few groups were better positioned than young Taiwanese with master’s degrees in engineering.
They came first as graduate students, to Berkeley and Stanford and the campuses of the University of California. Many never went home. Taiwan in those years offered limited opportunity for its brightest technical minds, and the United States offered laboratories, companies and green cards.
Unlike earlier Chinese immigrants, these newcomers had no interest in a Chinatown. They were professionals, and they settled where professionals settled: in the suburbs.
The semiconductor bridge
What turned a trickle of students into a community was the chip. As Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley through the 1970s and 1980s, Taiwanese engineers found themselves at the centre of it, designing and manufacturing the integrated circuits that the new industry consumed.
A transnational network formed between Silicon Valley and the Hsinchu-Taipei corridor, the heart of Taiwan’s own semiconductor industry. Capital, talent and information flowed both ways across the Pacific, and the engineers who moved between the two worlds were overwhelmingly Taiwanese.
Solidarity grew out of the universities they had left behind. By the mid-1980s the National Taiwan University alumni association alone counted around 1,500 members in the Bay Area, a ready-made web of classmates, references and dinner invitations that helped newcomers find jobs and footing.
The move to the hills
As these engineers married, prospered and had children, they bought houses. Cupertino, with its celebrated school district, drew the largest concentration and became the best-known Taiwanese suburb in the valley. But San Jose, vast and varied, absorbed thousands more.
Families gravitated to the newer, leafier parts of the city. Evergreen, in the south-east, offered family-sized homes and a calm distance from the freeways. Almaden Valley, tucked against the Santa Cruz foothills in the south-west, offered views and quiet and some of the best public schools in the city.
These were not enclaves in the old sense. A Taiwanese family in Almaden might have neighbours from a dozen countries. But the cumulative weight of those individual choices built a presence that the schools, the churches and the grocery aisles all came to register.
The boom and the broadening
The 1990s tech boom accelerated everything. Taiwan was by then a major manufacturer of microchips and personal-computer components, and the commercial ties between the island and the valley pulled still more engineers, managers and entrepreneurs into San Jose.
By the 2020 census, an estimated 32,000 Taiwanese Americans lived in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan area, roughly 8 percent of all Taiwanese Americans in the country. Santa Clara County, with more than 20,000 Taiwanese residents, trails only Los Angeles County in the state.
It is worth being clear about what this community is and is not. The Taiwanese of San Jose are distinct from the city’s much larger Vietnamese community, whose heart lies in the Little Saigon district along Story Road. They are distinct, too, from the mainland Chinese newcomers who arrived later, many of whom settled in neighbouring Santa Clara. Theirs is an older, quieter, more professional presence, woven into the fabric of the city rather than concentrated on any single corner.
The Landmarks
Taiwanese American Presbyterian Church, 3675 Payne Avenue. Organised in 1982, this is one of the anchors of Taiwanese religious and social life in San Jose. For immigrant families far from home, the Sunday service in their own language did far more than minister to souls. It pointed newcomers toward jobs, schools and one another, and it remains a gathering place for a generation that is now grandparents.
Canaan Taiwanese Christian Church, 4405 Fortran Court. Set near the northern industrial fringe of the city, Canaan is one of several independent Taiwanese congregations that grew up alongside the larger denominational churches. Its existence is a small measure of the community’s depth: large enough, and varied enough, to sustain more than one Taiwanese church under more than one banner.
Tzu Chi Foundation, 2355 Oakland Road. The Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation was founded in Taiwan and is one of the island’s best-known charitable institutions worldwide. Its San Jose presence reflects the other half of the community’s religious life, the Buddhist half, and channels volunteers into disaster relief, medical aid and environmental work far beyond the valley.
Avatamsaka Lotus Buddhist Society, 50 South Main Street, Milpitas. Just over the northern city line, the Huayen temple serves Taiwanese Buddhists across the South Bay with services conducted in Chinese. Milpitas and San Jose blur into one another here, and many San Jose families count this temple as their own.
Taiwan Restaurant, 1306 Lincoln Avenue. In the heart of Willow Glen, this long-running kitchen has fed the neighbourhood for more than two decades. It is the kind of unassuming, family-run place, salt-and-pepper pork chops and signature fried rice, that has quietly served as a Taiwanese landmark in a part of the city better known for its boutiques.
Shihlin Taiwan Street Snacks, Oakridge Mall. Named for one of Taipei’s most famous night markets, Shihlin brings the crisp, salty energy of Taiwanese street food into San Jose’s shopping centres, with a second location out in Berryessa. For younger Taiwanese Americans, a tray of XXL fried chicken is a direct line back to a market their parents once walked.
Grand Century Mall, 1111 Story Road. The great indoor Asian mall of Little Saigon is Vietnamese at its core, but its food courts, herbal shops and bakeries draw East Asian shoppers of every background, Taiwanese among them. It is a reminder that in a city this dense with Asian communities, the lines between them are porous and the marketplaces shared.
Where They Came From
The Taiwanese of San Jose came overwhelmingly from Taiwan’s cities, above all from Taipei and the surrounding north, where the universities and the technology industry were concentrated.
Many were the children of families who had themselves migrated, from mainland China to Taiwan around 1949, and who pushed their own children toward the safest of futures: a technical degree and a path overseas. The elite engineering programmes at National Taiwan University, National Tsing Hua and National Chiao Tung sent class after class to the United States.
The pull was specific. It was not farmland or freedom in the abstract that drew them but laboratories, graduate stipends and, after graduation, the companies of the Santa Clara Valley. They followed the work, and the work was here.
San Jose Today
The first generation has grown old in these hills. The engineers who came as students in the 1970s are retired now, and the question of who comes next has changed. Taiwan today offers its graduates careers as good as any abroad, and the steady stream of young arrivals has thinned.
What remains is a settled, prosperous, second- and third-generation community. The grandchildren of those first engineers were born in San Jose, played soccer in Almaden and Evergreen, and may speak more English than Mandarin or Taiwanese. The churches that once helped newcomers find apartments now run youth groups in two languages.
The community does not announce itself. There is no Taiwanese gate, no single street to point to. The largest annual celebration, the Taiwanese American Cultural Festival, draws the South Bay each spring but is staged up in San Francisco, at Union Square, a regional gathering rather than a local one. In San Jose itself the Taiwanese presence is felt instead in the everyday: in a church car park on Payne Avenue, a noodle counter in Willow Glen, a queue for fried chicken at Oakridge. It is the quiet legacy of a generation that built the valley’s machines and, almost as an afterthought, built a community to go with them.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Taiwanese live in San Jose?
As of the 2020 census, an estimated 32,000 Taiwanese Americans lived in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan area, about 8 percent of all Taiwanese Americans nationally. Santa Clara County alone counts more than 20,000 Taiwanese residents, the second-largest such population of any county in California.
Where do the Taiwanese in San Jose live?
Taiwanese families in San Jose cluster most visibly in the newer, more affluent neighbourhoods of Evergreen in the south-east and Almaden Valley in the south-west, both prized for their schools and quiet. The largest Taiwanese concentration in the wider valley, however, is in neighbouring Cupertino.
Why did Taiwanese immigrants come to Silicon Valley?
Most Taiwanese in San Jose came after the 1965 immigration reforms, first as graduate students in engineering and the sciences, then as professionals in the growing semiconductor industry. A strong transnational link between Silicon Valley and Taiwan’s own chip industry in the Hsinchu-Taipei corridor deepened the connection through the 1980s and 1990s.
Are the Taiwanese and Vietnamese communities in San Jose the same?
No. They are entirely distinct. San Jose’s Vietnamese community is far larger and centres on the Little Saigon district along Story Road, while the Taiwanese community is smaller, more dispersed and more professional, with no single neighbourhood at its heart.
What religious institutions serve the Taiwanese in San Jose?
Both Christian and Buddhist institutions serve the community. The Taiwanese American Presbyterian Church on Payne Avenue, organised in 1982, and the independent Canaan Taiwanese Christian Church anchor the Christian side, while the Taiwan-founded Tzu Chi Foundation on Oakland Road serves Buddhist and charitable life.
Is there a Taiwanese restaurant scene in San Jose?
Yes, though it is spread across the city rather than gathered in one district. Long-running spots such as Taiwan Restaurant in Willow Glen and night-market style chains like Shihlin Taiwan Street Snacks at Oakridge Mall keep Taiwanese flavours within easy reach of the community.
If your family’s story passed through San Jose, or any of the places Taiwanese Americans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a graduate stipend in Hsinchu or Taipei to a house in the Evergreen hills, to wherever you are now.