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, known as the San Gabriel Valley, would contain the largest suburban concentration of ethnic Chinese in the United States, surpassing the populations in the long-established Chinatowns of many major American cities.

So great were the number of new Chinese arrivals that some whites came to view them as part of a massive foreign invasion. “I feel like I’m in another country,” a white resident of Monterey Park complained to Timothy Fong, author of The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California. “I don’t feel at home anymore.” “I feel like a stranger in my own town,” another said. Cars flashed bumper stickers with messages like “Will the Last American to Leave Monterey Park Please Bring the Flag?” In 1986, a gas station in town posed the same question, along with a picture of two slanted eyes.

Anti-Chinese jokes began to surface: about senior citizens wearing pajamas in the streets, about reckless driving habits. “I Survived the Drive through Monterey Park,” one bumper sticker boasted. Monterey Park was dubbed the “Traffic Collision Capital of the World” and Atlantic Boulevard was “Suicide Boulevard,” causing residents to remark it should be illegal to be “DWC”—Driving While Chinese. But simmering below the taunts and snickers was hatred that often reflected envy of the openly displayed success of the new arrivals. When the local newspaper, the Monterey Park Progress, announced it would print a section in the Chinese language, vandals attacked Chinese-owned movie theaters, smashing windows and throwing paint on the marquees.

(Chang 325-326)