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The Yamaguchis live in Montebello, a largely Anglo and Mexican American suburb to the east. By far the greatest concentration of L.A.'s Japanese is in middle-class Gardena, a tiny town of neat stucco houses wedged between a huge black ghetto and a neighborhood of white-collar aerospace workers (Hughes, TRW). About 11,000 of Gardena's 47,000 residents are Japanese. "Oh, we see them a lot," says a White Gardenan. "They come out here [to the city hall mall] on one of their holidays with all of these fish and these kites. It's very nice."
Chinese came in force to California a century ago from Canton. But until the mid-1970s, Chinese Americans were a small part of L.A.'s ethnic patchwork, outnumbered almost 3 to 1 by Japanese. No longer: thousands have arrived from Taiwan and Hong Kong. To much of the local Chinese Establishment, the newcomers seem vulgar and pushy.
Richard Yen-Shih Koo, 43, stands somewhere in between. He was born in Shanghai, raised in Taipei, and crossed the Pacific at 24 to get his master's degree in business. For four years, alone in the U.S., he was separated from his wife Rut-Sun and daughter. But getting such a degree, he says, "was a dream for all [Taiwanese]. The psychological effect was to force you to go abroad."
He arrived in Berkeley, at the University of California, in 1964, during the height of the Free Speech Movement. Koo, however, was not remotely a rebel. He obeyed when an immigration official suggested that he adopt an English name. "I had no particular preference," he says. "My goal was success and to be rich." Koo, who became a naturalized citizen in 1977, has achieved his goal. He is a founder of an accounting firm with three Los Angeles offices and lives in a house on two acres. But for all that he has an accountant's cold clarity about his potential for bigger business success. "Our dreams must be realistic. I will never speak perfect English, and I look different. But everybody," he adds, "always faces some kind of discrimination." Koo works 60-hour weeks, so he does not see much of his two daughters. "Jean, my younger daughter," Koo admits, "at first refused to learn to speak Chinese. But she is O.K. now."
There are 42 Chinese language schools in the area: the Koos live near Monterey Park (pop. 57,700). The town, with its winding streets of cypress ranch houses set into the lush hillsides, is considered the Chinese enclave in L.A. In fact, the town is very mixed—39% Hispanic, 19% Chinese, the rest other Asians and whites—but the Chinese proportion has tripled in a decade. The new residents, late of Hong Kong and Taiwan, are spendthrifts: along Atlantic Boulevard, the cost of commercial space has gone up 700% since the early 1970s.
The Santiago siblings, who flew in from Manila last Thursday, will live in their parents' house in the middle-class suburb of Reseda. They will be among a comfortably large group of Filipinos there. But the 150,000 Filipinos (up from 33,500 in 1970) are, in fact, the most scattered of the Asian nationalities in Los Angeles. It is telling that a $5 million Filipino cultural center, designed and funded,