I have lived in Silicon Valley for almost 25 years so I am very familiar with the phenomenon of Asian “ethnoburbs” which have developed over the past couple of decades. Sorry if this post gets too long. I think this article vastly oversimplifies the reasons that whites have left communities such as Cupertino by assuming that the whites are all racist if they don’t want to be a minority in a predominantly Asian community. In fact, I would argue that white people in Silicon Valley are far more comfortable with diversity that whites in most parts of the country. After all, whites are a minority here and we are used to it. Many of us work and socialize every day with people of all different nationalities and ethnicities. If we didn’t like it, we wouldn’t live here at all. We’d move to Idaho or Utah or someplace.

I’ve heard from many friends that the problem is not that the Asian kids out perform the white students (everyone wants their kids to excel, and competition can be healthy), it’s that the Asian parents don’t want their kids socializing with white students, who they consider to be slackers who party and smoke pot, and will be a bad influence on their kids. (BTW, there is a LOT of racism in the Chinese community.) If you are the only white family in a neighborhood of overseas Chinese in Cupertino, you are going to feel pretty excluded. Also, Asian parents don’t want the schools to spend too much time on non-academic subjects like sports, drama or art, so the focus becomes intensely academic and stressful. Many white parents want their kids to enjoy school and have healthy self-esteem, not just excel academically.

A friend of mine recently invited me to see her daughter’s performance in the local summer children’s theater. There were 2 Asian kids in the class with about 20 white kids, even though the surrounding community is probably 50% Asian. It’s pretty clear that most Asian parents don’t sign up their kids for theater camp. (For what it’s worth, the 2 Asian kids gave outstanding performances that made the rest of the kids look like amateurs. Some of the white boys in the class barely knew their lines. Sometimes stereotypes have a grain of truth.)

Anyway, imagine being a parent and thinking, “If my kid goes to high school in Cupertino, he’ll be socially excluded and will be forced to study 24–7 to succeed, which will be miserable for us and for him… but if we move to this other town, he’ll have a lot of friends, get to play sports and be in the band and still do well in school, and we won’t all spend the next 4 years hating our lives…” what would your choice be?

The other factor that the author overlooks is economics. Cupertino gradually became Chinese because, as houses turned over, most of them were purchased by Chinese people. Why? Money. The Chinese who started moving to Cupertino were highly educated, successful and wealthy, with bundles of cash from their families overseas that they could use to buy a house. Of course this was not true of everyone, but it was true of a lot of people. They simply had more money that they were able and willing to spend. As the Chinese population grew, it became an even more desirable destination for other Chinese to move to, who were willing to spend even more money on a house, and so on.