Lives on Pembina
These maps were created for the project “Recreating Google Map: Lives on Pembina,” for Professor Jeongmin Kim’s class HIST-4000-T48 / HIST-7772-T32, Transpacific Labour History. They are meant to present an alternative view of the history of Asian diaspora communities on Pembina, and how transpacific labour and immigration has affected this area. The class worked in five groups, each focusing on a different section of Pembina. Once they had chosen a location, the groups analyzed their chosen areas on Google Maps, using the feature to see older dates in order to understand how the community has changed or stayed the same in the face of possible gentrification, construction, and the altering of community patterns within Pembina. These projects and their maps were presented in a group symposium on November 26th, 2025, with the curatorial introductions being written after feedback received from Professor Kim and the other groups. The aim of sharing this project is to represent the importance of the history which exists on Pembina, and to record the efforts that the students made to record this history.
The Dancing Noodle
Daniel Scarlett, Jaden Sawatzky, Nate Aston Cooney
For our group project, we decided to divide it based on the areas of work that would be researched. Daniel would be involved in researching the history of Lanzhou and explaining that history to the group. Jaden, meanwhile, would be in charge of researching the region over time and making the maps along with the changes that occurred. Finally, Nate would be in charge of researching the Chinese delivery service that the restaurant used, in addition to leading the writing of the final report.
We chose this site as it was connected to the personal history of one of our group members (Daniel), as he had often visited it for lunch during high school. With that said, it always seemed like an interesting restaurant with a larger story that no one had yet bothered to try and tell, and this, coupled with how it brings so many different regions from across the Pacific under one prairie roof, could not be ignored.
In re-visualizing the area, we attempted to look not only at the restaurant itself and its history but also at how Pembina and that specific portion of the street serve as the boundary for different communities, all coming together to use this vital artery of our city. Specifically, it serves as a physical barrier which also divides the surrounding area based on wealth and family recency in the country. On the side of Pembina where the dancing noodle is located, there exists a higher immigrant population, while the other side has larger houses with fewer of them as comparative starter homes. Additionally, we also tried to examine the street through the use of Fantuan’s delivery service by using it as a tool in seeing the high density of restaurants that use this app associated with the Chinese community. Finally, the service was also used as a way of attempting to locate very Asian restaurants along the street as a way of seeing if a general area could be discerned for this ethnic community. As such, we wanted to heavily focus on the idea of the ethnic enclave, and we tried to represent this through our changes to Google Maps.
Altogether, we invited groups to try and re-imagine the area in a similar light to the other Asian ethnic enclaves in California that were created after the original died out. Significantly, we felt that Pembia sort of occupies a similar space in Winnipeg, as while there are the original Asian ethnic enclaves still present, it is notable that they are farther away and less able to serve the southern half of the city. As such, Pembina, as another sort of ethnic Asian enclave, attempts to pick up the mantle and provide the Southern half of the city with its own ethnic enclave that can be readily visited.
88 Mart
Cecilia McLandress, Erin Matti, Bryanna Soke-Bjornson
88 Mart is a Korean grocery store located at 101-1855 Pembina Hwy. We chose this store because we wanted to study a Korean business that was not a restaurant. It is a typical small grocery store one might find in Winnipeg – save for the fact that they exclusively stock Korean grocery items, such as kimchi, samgyeopsal (pork belly), ramyeon (noodles), and various Korean snack foods and desserts. The staff almost exclusively speak Korean to each other, and many signs and price labels in the store are bilingual (English and Korean). It opened in 2010, when the owner moved from Seoul to Winnipeg. When we asked him why he chose Winnipeg, his only response was that he knew some people who had already moved here – because neither he had ever heard of the city otherwise. Furthermore, the store is called 88 Mart because 8 is an auspicious number in Chinese culture, not Korea; this reflects the importance of the transpacific aspects of this labour, rather than solely Korean. This answer made us reflect on the community connections prevalent withing transpacific labour historiography. Laureen Hom’s The Power of Chinatown shows similar themes concerning the networks of interrelations and the continuations of community even abroad. This site reflects transpacific labour history for several reasons; it exists because of transpacific migration, it serves immigrant communities, and it is a site of labour by itself. Moreover, many of the exact items carried at 88 Mart can also easily be found in any grocery store, supermarket, or convenience store in South Korea. The snacks are transpacific, too!
Our map re-visualizes the area surrounding 88 Mart by re-imagining the layered histories embedded in the space. It acknowledges Pembina’s significance as a Metis trade route as well as its later identity as a space that catered to white middle-class communities. By situating transpacific labour histories within this broader colonial context, the map highlights how present-day diasporic communities continue to exist on stolen land shaped by the displacement and forced relocation of Indigenous peoples.
The first layer presents the area pre-1870s and highlights the connection of the land to the Metis Nation. Labelled in Michif, the map emphasises the significance of the Pembina Trail, now Pembina Highway. It shows an important trade route that not only connected people but became the basis to the area’s labour history.
The English map is situated in the middle and represents the area during the early 2000s. The Southwood Supper Club was a stylistic high-end restaurant that was affordable. This map shows the shifting demographic of the area but also displays the impacts of settler colonialism.
The Korean map layer is the most recent of the three, and it captures the present status of the area surrounding 88 Mart. It indicates 88 Mart itself (with a picture of the sign), as well as the surrounding businesses, apartments, and Pembina Highway – all written in Korean.
The map invites viewers to reimagine the area by pealing back and revealing the different layers. the map showcases a changing society that speaks to Indigenous, colonial, and transpacific labour histories. On their own, each map tells an individual story, but when the layers are placed on top of one another, the maps begin to form one cohesive history about the lives on Pembina.
Pembina Strip
Amiel Esmen, Grayson Lewer, Emma Dubeski, Erika Santos
This project looks at how two distinct areas of Winnipeg, Chinatown and Pembina Hwy, can show the ways the city has been evolving over the past few decades. Although the connection between the two spaces appears to be unrelated at first, comparing them highlights how people, businesses, and sometimes, whole neighbourhoods shift over time. This map brings attention to the importance of the Pembina Strip, and by highlighting certain spaces, and connecting that with the changing demographics of the area, we can closely examine the changes over the years and see the effects of these changes more clearly.
Chinatown is a good starting point as for years it dealt with a declining population due to safety concerns in the area, as well as empty storefronts. Despite signs of renewal in recent years–like the announcement of an affordable housing project replacing a vacant site that was once home to Shanghai Restaurant, and cultural programming to bring back people in the area–the neighbourhood still faces challenges.
Moving south, specifically where Abinoji Mikanah and Pembina Hwy meet, Pembina Strip holds a cluster of restaurants, retail stores, and more leisure-focused spaces. Places like 88 Mart, ING Supermarket, Unique Bunny, Gongcha, and a wide range of Asian restaurants have helped shape this stretch of Pembina as a convenient hub for all things that cater to its Asian immigrant population. Many of these businesses support each other by attracting customers who often visit multiple spots in one trip due to the convenience of a shared parking lot between them.
These changes are a reflection of what has been happening in the surrounding area. While Chinatown lost a large portion of its population in the late twentieth century, Pembina Strip grew steadily. Today, 70 percent of the neighbourhood is made up of visible minorities, mostly of Asian descent. The area is particularly appealing for newcomers and families due to the more affordable rental market, and easy access to major roads that lead to other areas of the city.
Pembina Village
Isabelle Balcaen, Emmitt Wilson, Joseph Riedle
Our group has created three unique maps across a thirty-year period, to reflect the gradual shift towards the Pembina Village we recognize today. We have also chosen to include street view images of this mapped area to show the physical, as well as aerial, transformation of this space. We chose this area because it is an intrinsic part of Emmitt and Isabelle’s lived experiences growing up in South Winnipeg. Their frequent visitation of A1 Nail Pampers provides insight into how Asian-owned businesses on the Pembina strip have become landmarks to white Canadians, beyond the Asian ethnic diaspora. Specifically, we are reimagining three strip malls between Chancellor Drive and Markham Road. Our maps, dated 1997, 2009, and 2025, suggest a major increase in the opening of Asian-owned restaurants, grocers/markets, and cosmetic services. This transformation concludes the essentialization of Asian labour, and entrepreneurship to the flow of capital through this area of Pembina.
Our work revisualizes Pembina Highway through its focus on the entrepreneurial development, cultural exchange, and economic assimilation of Asian businesses into a western economic framework. In 1997, there were very few ethnically Asian restaurants on this strip, however, as we fast forward through time, many previously white-owned businesses, such as Country Host Pie Palace, Henry Armstrong Instant Print, and public offices like the community police office, were bought out by Asian migrants. Now, in 2025, the presence of fusion-type restaurants and services, reflects a migration of Asian immigrants, and their wealth from Chinatown, or other ethnic enclaves, to white-suburban areas. This speaks to Dr. Hom’s analysis of Chinatown in San Francisco, in how we study the successes and failures of Chinese immigrants who have moved beyond the borders of Chinatown. Whether through a relaxing of racially targeted policies, or through imposed gentrification, the presence of Chinese restaurants on this Pembina strip parallels Dr. Hom’s study of the integration of wealthier Chinese migrants into, in this case, Canadian suburbia.
The marketing of these restaurants, such as Sun Lung Tok as ‘canadian-chinese,’ in 1997 and Daily Oriental Foods as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, in 2025, reflects a fusion-based theme which threads through these decades. In tandem with Nile Green’s argument about, ‘the idea of Asia,’ the integration of a variety of Asian ethnicities into one business identity, shows how Asian immigrants have reclaimed the European imperialist homogenization of Asia, in pursuit of economic survival in the west. By marketing themselves as an ‘Asian fusion,’ these restaurants and markets play on the internalized imperialism of the white audiences who frequent them by offering an ‘Eastern’ experience. As we have read in, Kim’s Convenience, Appa’s geopolitical passion infers a rejection of Japanese goods and cars, however, on Pembina, the transition from Masa Japanese Restaurant, to Kiwa Korean Cuinese, or the presence of Japanese/Korean fusions, shows that Asian immigrants circumvent these larger geopolitical histories in pursuit of western capitalist success.
When studying this map, we invite audiences to reimagine Pembina as ethnically diverse space, which relies on the labour, networks of communication, and economic innovation of a variety of Asian diasporic migrants. The lived experience of Canadian Millennial and Gen Z generations are inseparable from their engagement with these businesses whether they frequent them with their families or are simply traveling down Pembina. The capital which flows out of the pockets of customers and into the businesses we have highlighted reflect the successes of Asian entrepreneurs in Canada despite long histories of economic and racial marginalization.
T.H. Dang
Bridget Scott, Elizabeth Gillich, Emma Sciarretta, Andreas Davison
2007 is the beginning of T.H. Dang and its history on Pembina. In 2007, the Sweet Palace Restaurant was running where T.H. Dang’s would inevitably open. It was an East Indian and Canadian fusion restaurant and had not yet adopted the green palette that adorns T.H. Dang’s. There were several restaurants open near Sweet Palace Restaurant during this period. Delicious, which was a vegan restaurant, Bagtime Pizza and George’s Inn Submarine, which sold sandwiches. Additionally, there were grocery stores, such as the large chain Safeway and Hoa Ky LTD. Two of the locations on this map remain until 2025: Cottage Inn Bakery and Hoa Ky LTD. For the 2009 period, T.H. Dang was not yet open. Instead, it was Ling Long Restaurant. Ling Long was the first step in T.H. Dang gaining their iconic green colour on the inside and outside of the building. The major changes to the map of Pembina were: the closure of Connections cabaret, which would become Stella’s. Piston Tires, which would become Hoa Ky’s second location. The long-established Cottage Bakery, Chicken Delight, and Safeway on Pembina.
By 2015 Pembina had undergone multiple changes. While Safeway and Chicken Delight remain ever-constant, some businesses like Goldmark Jewelers and OSI Security Measures had updated or renovated buildings. New businesses included Athena Couture, Roll Cake Bakery and Desserts, Asian Cabana, and Hera Beauty Salon. Most importantly, T.H. Dang was finally open with its iconic green storefront. The building which housed multiple radio stations now included 99.9 BOB FM, 103.1 Virgin Radio, and TSN Radio 1290. Lastly, a blank, newly renovated building was soon going to be Stella’s Cafe.
2019 did not see much change from the past years. The biggest shift was in comparison to the 2025 map, how the strip mall has many more businesses such as Golden Stitches, Georges Subs and Iron Entertainment store. Most businesses stayed open post-covid compared to the present day map.
As the last most recent map completed (2025), you are able to see the shift in businesses that have occurred on Pembina, with the exception of Chicken Delight, Cottage Bakery and Fresh Co., which is owned by its previous store, Safeway. The most interesting shift on this strip would be Indian Food Corner, which took up a majority of the strip mall located two blocks from T.H. Dang, Hoa Ky LTD. also created a secondary location in the old Piston Ring building.