Arizona’s Tiny Taipei: How a Taiwanese Chip Factory Seeded a Community

Arizona’s Tiny Taipei: How a Taiwanese Chip Factory Seeded a Community

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 Semic…