The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [165]
Knowing that even American borders might not protect them from retaliation caused many Chinese to focus their energies on economic achievement rather than politics. Most grew up in families that had fled mainland China to either Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the United States, and had witnessed firsthand the risks of being caught on the losing side of a political struggle. Many of their parents had urged them since childhood to seek their fortune in a lucrative field that required neither English-language skills nor personal connections in a foreign country. One obvious career path ran through the newly developing high-tech industries.
The 1980s spawned a revolution in personal computers, and the Chinese in the United States would play their part right from the beginning. In 1980, David Lam, a Hong Kong immigrant with a doctorate from MIT, founded Lam Research, which produced the first completely automated plasma etcher for chip wafer processing. The firm later grew into a global giant in the semiconductor field. In 1987, David Wang, a Taiwanese immigrant with a Berkeley Ph.D. in material sciences, co-invented the Precision 5000 multiple chamber single-wafer system, which combined two of the most complex steps in chip-making into a single process, thereby transforming the manufacture of integrated circuits.
Taiwanese immigrants John Tu and David Sun became billionaires with memory modules, Pehong Chen with software. In the 1980s, Charles Wang, son of a supreme court justice from Shanghai, kept a small company, Computer Associates International, alive by juggling credit cards and bartering computer services in Manhattan. Within two decades, his company grew into the second largest independent software maker in the world, an empire that spans two dozen countries on five continents.
The 1980s would bear witness to the growth of a nouveau riche class of Chinese immigrants. As the People’s Republic gained political support from the United States, many better-situated residents of Taiwan and Hong Kong, fearing that the PRC might soon take over Taiwan and Hong Kong, quietly searched for new sanctuaries. Taiwanese and Hong Kong capital began to flow to American cities. While many Chinese businessmen moved their families into exclusive white neighborhoods in the United States, others created their own communities, mostly in California. As they invested in real estate, banks, restaurants, malls, and Chinese-language newspapers, they formed wealthy new ethnic enclaves that some would later call “suburban Chinatowns.” These communities, populated by people of diverse backgrounds, such as émigrés from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, are called “ethnoburbs” by sociologist Wei Li. Within these enclaves, many relied on their Chinese heritage to broker symbiotic business deals, such as matching Taiwanese or Hong Kong money with ethnic Chinese manpower from Southeast Asia. “Say I am Chinese, I come from Vietnam,” a journalist explained. “You are Chinese and you come from Taiwan or maybe Singapore, or maybe Hong Kong. I need money—I need you to support my business ... you have the money, but you don’t know how to run [this] business. So you check my credit and ask the other people ... Maybe you are partner or maybe I give you interest in six months. It works because we [are] all Chinese.”
One affluent enclave was Monterey Park, near Los Angeles, nicknamed the “Chinese Beverly Hills.” Toward the end of the twentieth century, Chinese constituted more than one-third of Monterey Park’s population and more than one-quarter in the nearby communities of Alhambra and San Marino. Before long this region of southern California,