Andrew Li, an immigrant from Taiwan, was selling real estate and developing new homes in the 1980s in the Northgate neighborhood, where Judy and Joe settled two years after moving to Fremont. Andrew reported that while the low cost of new homes and job accessibility were the main draws for Asian Americans moving to the city during the period, one could not discount the important role that pioneers such as the Wus also played:
Chinese, Filipinos—they may have a townhome or house in Daly City. They got invited by their friends and they bought a home in Fremont. They would invite them over for Saturday afternoon barbecues. It would be 80 degrees. They enjoyed it tremendously. They would go back to Daly City where it would be 45 degrees on Saturday night. … Sunday morning, they would drive to Fremont again, looking for a house. … The house prices were comparable, and the weather was much better.
As Andrew noted, social networks drew many Asian Americans southward and to particular Silicon Valley communities. The easiest places to settle were often those with or in close proximity to extant minority populations. In Fremont, the long history of Chinese American, Japanese American, and Filipino American farmworkers increased its popularity among Asian American newcomers. Many came by word of mouth, following family members and friends to neighborhoods such as Northgate. David Li, whose Chinese American roots in the Bay Area date back to the 1850s, recalled that one of the things that convinced his parents to move from Berkeley to Fremont in the mid-1960s was that his mother’s cousin had recently relocated there.
Social relations were not the only factor that drove David’s parents to Fremont. Like many other Asian Americans, they were attracted to the range of possibilities that suburbia seemed to promise its residents. They wanted better schools and larger homes in safe, less crowded neighborhoods and also wanted to escape the same “urban ills” as their White neighbors. This no doubt included the growing concentration of poor communities of color. David stressed his parents’ desire for a quiet, semirural lifestyle. Shortly after he was born, his working-class parents purchased a four-bedroom home in Irvington that supported their growing family and a different sort of lifestyle than they had enjoyed in Berkeley. David explained:
I think it was just different. Fremont was just starting out. It was already a city, but it was a spread out community. “Spread out” meaning in between the neighborhoods that had sprung up at the time, we had farms and cow pastures. It was a different kind of living. It was country living. We just wanted to get away from the inner city, so to speak, and get back to the country. … I think [my parents] wanted a fresh start. … They decided there may be a better future for us there. It was a growing community with a lot of possibility.
In Fremont, David moved into a new home on a new street, with a new high school nearby. In all its novelty, suburbia invoked an endless sense of possibility, especially for those who had long been denied its benefits.
Though many Asian Americans held high hopes for their new suburban lives, they all too often found themselves surrounded by a sea of circumspect White faces. In 1970 Fremont’s population was 97% White, including about 10% of the population that categorized themselves as being of “Spanish origin.” In Fremont, this likely included a large percentage of Portuguese farmers, who had worked the land for generations. Asian Americans were less than 2% of the population. By 1980 Asian Americans had made significant inroads, growing to about 9,600 people, or roughly 7% of the population. Still, Asian Americans were a distinct minority, and they felt it. Having entered elementary school in Fremont in the early 1970s, David recalled being 1 of only 2 Chinese American boys at his school. Though his family was “acculturated”—eating meat loaf and pizza for dinner most nights, “not rice bowls”—he grew up with the nagging feeling that he was different. While he did not recall any direct acts of racial discrimination, he felt his difference in simple, everyday activities such as looking at his class pictures year after year in which everyone but him was blond or brunette.
Whether driven by feelings of isolation or hostility, many early Asian American suburban pioneers looked for communities to which they could belong outside of their local neighborhoods. To establish a stronger sense of community and retain their cultural ties, several early ethnic and cultural associations developed in Fremont. The South Bay Chinese Club (SBCC) was founded in Fremont in 1965 to preserve Chinese culture and customs while also fostering and encouraging better understanding among Chinese Americans of their civic responsibilities and the “American way of life.” 47 The SBCC was and continues to be largely a social club for American-born Chinese. The Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA) started its first California chapter in Fremont in 1974, drawing its members from across the South Bay and the East Bay. Inspired by groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Japanese American Civics League, the OCA had a far more political agenda than the SBCC. The OCA was concerned with both the civil rights and political representation of Chinese Americans. Judy Wu was among the California chapter’s founding members. Having grown up on the East Coast, where her parents were active in the organization, Judy was concerned with the lack of Asian American political representation in Fremont, a cause that she and her husband fought hard for. With their support, Yoshio Fujiwara became the first Asian American elected to the city council in 1978.
Religious institutions also became an important part of the emerging cultural and community fabric. In 1978, Gurdwara Sahib was founded in Fremont to serve the religious needs of the region’s growing Sikh American population. By the mid-1980s, Fremont’s diverse faith institutions had come to include Wat Buddhanusorm, a Thai Buddhist temple; Vedic Dharma Samaj, a Hindu temple; and a host of small mosques and Asian ethnic Christian churches scattered throughout the city.
Despite Asian Americans’ efforts to develop a sense of community rooted in their common suburban experiences, many continued to rely on established urban centers for their daily necessities and social support. Fremont’s Chinese American residents still regularly traveled 30 miles or more to Oakland’s and San Francisco’s Chinatowns on the weekends to do their grocery shopping, eat out, or get a haircut. Indian Americans would head to University Avenue in Berkeley, where clusters of retailers and restaurants could be found near the University of California campus. These neighborhoods were not just service centers; they also served as important social and cultural hubs that provided moments of relief and a meeting point for those who had left their communities behind when they moved to the South Bay suburbs. This generation of Asian American pioneers consisted of largely young families headed by U.S.-born householders who had struggled to afford entry into the suburbs and build the community and cultural infrastructure they needed to thrive. They were quickly joined by a generation of recently arrived Asian immigrants who were doing the same.
NEW IMMIGRANT GATEWAY (1970–1990)
By the 1970s the technology industry in Silicon Valley was blossoming, and so too was Asian immigration. New laws made way for fresh waves of émigrés, while a growing number of high-tech companies ensured plentiful opportunities for their employment. As the valley’s population grew, so too did its reputation as a place that was “good for immigrants.” As they had done for generations, Asian immigrants imagined the Bay Area as a land of bountiful wealth and opportunity. But now their visions centered on the possibilities arising in South Bay, not in San Francisco. The New Gold Mountain was, in fact, not gold at all—it was silicon.
By the 1970s, Santa Clara Valley was fully engaged in its transformation from an economy based on agriculture to defense and aerospace contracting. Facilitated by alliances that began during the early Cold War period, Stanford University engineering professor and future provost Frederick E. Terman, the so-called “father of Silicon Valley,” pioneered efforts to pair talented university researchers and engineers with the needs of emerging industries to create a “community of technical scholars.” 48 Thriving off its unique culture of competition and collaboration, the region became a hub of innovation that gave birth to some of the most important technological milestones of the late 20th century. From microelectronics and the semiconductor to the personal computer, the region broke
