Chinese Americans in the context of "Chinese in San Francisco"

Chinese, including Mandarin and Cantonese among other varieties, is the third most-spoken language in the United States, and is mostly spoken within Chinese-American populations and by immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, especially in California and New York. Around 2004, over 2 million Americans spoke varieties of Chinese, with Mandarin becoming increasingly common due to immigration from mainland China and to some extent Taiwan. Within this category, approximately one third of respondents described themselves as speaking Cantonese or Mandarin specifically, with the other two thirds answering "Chinese", despite the lack of mutual intelligibility between different varieties of Chinese. This phenomenon makes it more difficult to readily identify the relative prevalence of any single Chinese language in the United States.

According to data reported on the 2000 US census long-form, 259,750 people spoke "Cantonese", with 58.62% percent residing in California and the next most with 16.19% in New York. The actual number of Cantonese speakers was probably higher. In the 1982–83 school year, 29,908 students in California were reported to be using Cantonese as their primary home language. Approximately 16,000 of these students were identified as limited English proficient (LEP).

Historically there has been a population of Chinese Americans in Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. As of 2010, there were 393,488 Chinese Americans in Los Angeles County, 4.0% of the county's population, and 66,782 Chinese Americans in the city of Los Angeles (1.8% of the total population).

Taishan is a county-level city in the southwest of Guangdong province, China. It is administered as part of the prefecture-level city of Jiangmen. During the 2020 census, there were 907,354 inhabitants (941,095 in 2010), but only 433,266 were considered urban. As one of the most renowned qiao'xiangs, Taishan calls itself the "First Home of the Overseas Chinese". An estimated half a million Chinese Americans are of Taishanese descent.

It was named Xinning (新寧) until 1914, which was romanised as "Sunning".

Kaiping (simplified Chinese: 开平; traditional Chinese: 開平), alternately romanized in Cantonese as Hoiping, in local dialect as Hoihen, is a county-level city in Guangdong Province, China. It is located in the western section of the Pearl River Delta and administered as part of the prefecture-level city of Jiangmen. The surrounding area, especially Sze Yup (四邑), are often venerated with the title "qiaoxiang" (侨乡), for they are the ancestral homelands of many overseas Chinese, particularly in the United States. Kaiping has a population of 748,777 as of 2020 and an area of 1,659 square kilometres (641 sq mi). The locals speak a variant of the Sze Yup dialect.