Fremont: The Asian American City that rates as “Happiest” in the United States

In the movie Didi, the lead character Chris seems anything but happy.  Ironically, his home of Fremont, which is also the home town of Didi‘s creator Sean Wang, was selected by Wallethub as the happiest city in the United States.  One doesn’t typically associated Asian Americans with great happiness, so how could this majority Asian city of 224,000 (62%) be voted as such a happy place?

To understand how Fremont could rank so high, it is best to look at the criteria that WalletHub used.  They had tree broad categories:  “Emotional and Physical Well-Being,” “Income and Employment,” and “Community and Environment.” “Emotional and Physical Well-Being”  included things like life satisfaction, suicide rate, life expectancy. “Income and Employment” included not just income, but measures of poverty rate , job security, and job satisfaction and opportunity.  “Community and Environment” includes separation and divorce rate, hate crime incidents per capita, and park land per resident.

Is Fremont really all that happy?  I lived there through my high school years and after college, and for Asian Americans, it can be a very comfortable place.  Asian Americans are by far the majority in the city, so it feels safe from hate crimes, which is ironic given the resistance that they encountered when becoming more prominent in the city. There are plenty of parks, and I have enjoyed putting in miles running around Fremont’s Lake Elizabeth (pictured above) and Quarry Lakes park. Mission Peak is popular place to hike, to the point where the area around Mission Peak has gotten overloaded at times. Although actress Joan Chen lived in the Bay Area for years and raised her family in San Francisco, she had never visited Fremont before making the movie.  She said in an interview:

I’ve lived here forever and never been to Fremont.  I discovered all these wonderful boba teahouses, Asian restaurants and Asian markets. It’s actually a very wonderful suburb.

I can vouch for that – Fremont does have decent Asian food.

Is Fremont happy for everyone? While it is often great for Asian Americans, it can be not so great for African Americans.  This article from Metro Silicon Valley cites an African American man who says that while it is safer, it is hard to find the same kind of community that he had in Oakland. Fremont can also be a hard place to live if you don’t make a lot of money – the Metro cites a publisher who had to move as he couldn’t afford it any more when he retired.

As I mentioned above, I found Fremont to be a great to live, although definitely not perfect. It’s interesting that in a time when immigrants are being vilified, a heavily immigrant place could be rated as the happiest city in the US.

(photo credit: Oleg Alexandrov  licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)