This study pays attention to ask “what” people seized with the memory method of nostalgic culture fever of Shanghai “had seen and had failed to see.” When we extend this question and read Puping in depth, we end up asking the issue of “livelihoods of the people” as a world of experience and survival of the modern Chinese history of the 20th century in which a variety of lives of migrant workers had undergone in Shanghai during this period of socialism, and not as the fixed memory of modernity of Shanghai that is easily consumed. The collapse of rural villages due to wars and disasters and the concomitant urban migrant labor and refugeeized lives--The multifarious life stories of migrant work described in Puping arouse the problem of migration and settlement in modern Chinese history that oscillates between the desire for labor and survival in pursuit of a stable rhythm of life and the reality of migration and labor floating from the place to another after having been uprooted from their original place. At the same time, this shows that refugeeized lives in the city not only form lives with self-esteem through their own labor even in precarious places such as “shanty towns” but also create a community in which reciprocal ethics circulates, taking root and acquiring a sense of placeness. It indicates the possibility of which the community of the weakest members of society open to the external world without having to damage their self-esteem. Despite the fact that they lead refugeeized lives, the image of a village of migrant workers with a strong sense of self-esteem and solidarity may be another aspect of modernity of Shanghai of the 20th century that encircles “modern Shanghai.”