After Helen Wang finishes work at the new microchip plant looming over the Arizona desert, she drives home to start her side hustle: cooking pots of spicy beef soup and pork noodles for Taiwanese colleagues who are hungry for a taste of home.
There were almost no Asian groceries or Taiwanese restaurants nearby when the first workers began landing on the northern edge of Phoenix two years ago to work at a chip factory operated by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Since then, the workers and their families have turned a mostly white corner of strip-mall suburbia into a Tiny Taipei.
Taiwanese businesses are popping up near taquerias and nail salons. Taiwanese cooks have joined Ms. Wang in ferrying meals to the chip factory’s parking lot. Supermarkets have started stocking Taiwanese sauces and noodles. The sound of Mandarin floats through day care centers and schools, where 282 Taiwanese students are enrolled this year.
The spaceshiplike factory drawing thousands of workers and their families to the area is a crucial part of President Biden’s effort to bolster advanced chip production in the United States. The company, known as TSMC, has committed $65 billion to the project and is set to receive $6.6 billion in grants through the CHIPS and Science Act.
Now, the future of TSMC’s Arizona factory — and the lives of its Taiwanese workers here — may rest on whether President-elect Donald J. Trump tries to undercut government aid for the company or imposes new restrictions on foreign workers. Although the TSMC project began during Mr. Trump’s first term, he has criticized the CHIPS Act and accused Taiwan of poaching the American semiconductor industry, and a debate over visas for skilled workers has already caused a rift among Mr. Trump’s backers.
For the Taiwanese workers, the shifting geopolitics of immigration and trade are far beyond their control. They said their main concerns were long workdays spent trying to bring the plant online while adjusting to a new life of eight-lane freeways, children’s play dates and blistering desert heat 7,200 miles from home.
The growing numbers of workers are seeding a cultural and demographic shift where the Phoenix sprawl melts into the Sonoran Desert. Real estate developers are converting a beige outdoor mall into an Asian shopping center. Its name, 808 Union Hills Plaza, plays up the lucky number eight in Chinese numerology. The wife of one engineer at TSMC’s plant has already opened a boba tea shop there. Other developers are hoping to build Taiwanese-style townhouses in the desert off a dead-end road near the factory.
“It all happened so quickly,” said Wen Chang, a Taiwanese restaurateur who moved to Arizona this year from New Mexico when he heard about the influx of new workers.
Mr. Chang opened Taiwan Bistro, a stir-fry restaurant a 15-minute drive from the plant, and now delivers dozens of boxed lunches there every workday. Many evenings, the restaurant is packed with Taiwanese patrons singing karaoke and TSMC employees introducing signature dishes like three-cup chicken to their American co-workers.
“They say it feels like home, like a community center,” Mr. Chang said. “In America, you don’t have this kind of Taiwanese food culture and lifestyle. Many people find life quite dull.”
New Taiwanese families said they had felt welcomed. Some of them had struggled with different traffic rules and the absence of universal health care. But as a whole, they are finding their feet in this diffusely populated land that is the opposite of Taiwan, an island of nearly 24 million people a little bigger in size than Maryland.
But their arrival has stoked tension inside the plant, where about half of the approximately 2,200 employees have been brought in from Taiwan. Some other Taiwanese workers have come to Arizona on temporary contracts for constructing the factories. The company expects the proportion of American workers to increase as it builds out its plants.
Labor unions in Arizona complained when TSMC sought visas for 500 Taiwanese workers to install highly specialized equipment. And 13 former employees have filed a lawsuit accusing TSMC of having an “anti-American culture.” The suit said TSMC had denied workers who were not Asian or Taiwanese opportunities to advance, giving them poorer evaluations and forcing them out of the company.
TSMC declined to comment on the lawsuit, but said in a statement that it believed in the value of a diverse work force and that it provided channels for employees to raise concerns.
Current and former TSMC employees have said some American workers are not accustomed to the company’s demanding workplace culture and rigorous hours. Cultural differences, including communication style, have led to frustration on both sides.
TSMC said its first factory in Phoenix was expected to begin commercial production in the first half of 2025. The company has two more factories in the pipeline. The plants will make advanced chips critical for enabling artificial intelligence and defense systems.
In more than a dozen interviews, Taiwanese workers, their spouses and their children said they had decided to uproot their old lives for a combination of new experiences, English education for their children and financial incentives — up to triple the usual salary along with perks like housing subsidies.
“As long as you have thick skin, there are no problems,” said Katie Wang, a former TSMC contractor who moved to Phoenix with her husband and children in 2022.
Employees said TSMC had helped their families with housing and transportation when they arrived. Leaders from an established Taiwanese community on the opposite side of the Phoenix metro area stepped in to help them learn English, get driver’s licenses and find Asian markets and doctors.
In quiet ways, the TSMC families have started to announce their presence. Some place corporate awards in their front windows at apartment complexes near the factory. Children have joined baseball teams and dance classes, and parents have been invited to schools to explain Lunar New Year traditions. Deliveries of fermented bean paste and soy sauce from the Asian market Weee sit on their stoops alongside the more familiar sight of Amazon boxes.
Two years ago, a Taiwanese pastor at the Northwest Chinese Baptist Church began offering English conversation classes at the request of a handful of people. These days, the classes attract more than 100 participants, many of them spouses of TSMC engineers.
“Taiwanese people help Taiwanese people,” said Gary Chen, a real estate broker originally from Taiwan who helps as a translator during the English classes. “They have all kinds of different needs as an immigrant community. They didn’t have enough help.”
Many new arrivals use Line, the dominant messaging app in Taiwan, to ask more unexpected questions: How do you find a Mandarin-speaking dentist? Where can you buy hockey skates? Why is all American Chinese food so sweet?
“It’s so different,” said Rebecca Wang, 43, who moved to Phoenix with her husband and two young children in November 2022.
Before she arrived, Ms. Wang said, people warned her that gangs were everywhere and that the streets were unsafe after dark. Instead, she said, she has been stunned by how many fathers show up at school pickup, and how quiet the streets of her new subdivision are. She said she did not know whether the family would stay after her husband’s three-year contract with TSMC ended. But last year, the family decided to buy a Spanish-tiled home with a palm tree out front and a pool out back.
“This is what we want from America,” Ms. Wang said.
Like many women whose husbands work at TSMC, Ms. Wang gave up her career in Taiwan to become a full-time mother in Arizona. She had been a project manager with a solar company, but she said the time difference and demands of caring for two young children made it impossible to sustain her job, especially when her husband often worked until 8 p.m.
Other women said finding work was hard when they spoke limited English and did not have the necessary visas. Instead, several have started their own businesses from home, selling meals and crafts, styling hair or doing nails.
Kate Yu, 33, started her business after her husband’s colleagues at TSMC began salivating over the braised chicken and pork belly she prepared for his lunches. She made extra for them and soon expanded into baked goods and Taiwanese staples like popcorn chicken and bubble tea. She now has her own cafe, Taiwan Mama, and opened a second location over the summer.
“When we came here, we didn’t know what to do,” she said.
Running a kitchen was a departure from her Taiwanese career as a computer engineer, but Ms. Yu’s grandfather and father had been chefs and had owned restaurants. Making milk tea and bento boxes felt like something familiar in an unfamiliar place. As her business grew, Ms. Yu’s mother flew over from Taiwan to help care for her three children.
She does not know whether the family will stay for good, but she has signed a five-year lease on the new restaurant. “When we first opened the store, it was simply because we craved some Taiwanese food,” she said. “I still find it hard to get used to things like burgers and pizzas. Occasionally is fine, but having them every day feels strange.”
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