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In this Census Feature: Around America: Rise in Minority Numbers California: Diverse, but Still Segregated San Francisco: Major Trends Daly City: Finding Comfort Milpitas: Living Near Tech Central Monterey Park: Ground Zero in API Growth Boom

Monterey Park

Ground zero in U.S. Asian growth boom

By John Rogers/AP

When it comes to Asian American population explosion, this bustling city just five miles east of Los Angeles is ground zero.

Known at the beginning of the 1970s as an aging but respectable postwar suburb, Monterey Park in those days provided an affordable bedroom community lifestyle to thousands of working-class families, almost all of them white or Latino.

Thirty years later it is a bustling regional business and banking center where 60,000 residents live in some of Southern California’s priciest homes. And with a 61 percent Asian population as of the 2000 census, it is widely known as both “Little Taipei” and “The Chinese Beverly Hills.”

It was that latter nickname, both demographics experts and longtime residents say, that may have done more than anything else to turn Monterey Park into America’s first Asian American majority city in the 1980s.

“Fred Hsieh, he did that,” City Councilwoman Judy Chu notes with a chuckle.

Known as the father of modern-day Monterey Park, Frederic Hsieh was a promotion-minded young real estate agent from Hong Kong when he approached the Chamber of Commerce in the 1970s with a novel suggestion.

Tens of thousands of highly educated, upwardly mobile Chinese were poised to move here, he told the incredulous business leaders, if someone would just market the place properly.

It turned out that Hsieh, who died in 1999, knew just how to do that.

For starters, he would translate the city’s name into the Chinese equivalent of Lush Green Valley, even if rain-starved Southern California is rarely green for more than a few months a year.

He would play up the city’s area code, then 818, because eight is a lucky number in Chinese. And he would declare Monterey Park “Asian friendly,” noting that 15 percent of the city’s population was already Asian in 1970, although most of those residents were Japanese Americans.

It was a campaign so successful that 75-year-old Cecilia Yu, who has lived here seven years now, echoes the words of many residents when she says: “Everybody in Taiwan has heard of Monterey Park.”

Not everyone in the city that went from 50 percent white to an Asian majority in just a decade was happy about the rapid change.

At one point the City Council passed a nonbinding resolution declaring English as the official language, and tense battles followed over whether to allow Asian books in the library or even Asian letters on the storefronts of Asian-owned businesses.

The backlash eventually passed as the Asian American continued to move in and the whites and Latinos began to adapt.

Now, at venerable St. Thomas Aquinas church, Father Gabriel Lui barely has time after conducting a Sunday Catholic service in Mandarin to meet with worshippers. That’s because he has to hurry back inside the sanctuary to take part in another service, in English. Later in the day there will be still another, in Spanish.

Church member Joseph Ching likes it that way. It gives him the chance to meet a lot of interesting people, he says, and practice his English on them as he prepares for his citizenship exam.

“I love the United States,” the retired military man says. “After all, the United States was our ally in World War II.”