Tuhao, China’s nouveau riche

Tuhao combines the words for “dirt” and “splendor” to form a word for China’s nouveau riche, derisively used by the French for their bourgeoisie and now used to designate the new countryside rich without the cultural urban refinement of the moneyed city folks. I gather that the term braggadocio among the rap groups fit into this definition. “Money is what I go for and when I get, I make the world go round!”

I live in the first batch of apartment housing when Shenyang decided to create its satellite cities outside its immediate city limits. For the geography familiar, Shenhe District is the city proper north of the Hun He (he is “river”), housing the Gugong Palace, the old Manchu administrative center, while the Qing Dynasty’s cemetery is north, now UNESCO-designated as the Beiling Park.

Huanggu northwest and Dadong northeast are the old residential areas. The new satellite cities are Tiexi in the west, Heping in the south, Hunan in the southwest, a Dadong extension in the east, and Shenbei in the north where Daoyi hosts an extensive university system. I taught in one of universities before moving out to the old Shenbei center where four generational layers of high-rise housing is evident.

One can tell the old ones like the one I am in (fourth generation) for the absence of elevators, usually six floors with roof gardens dotted with crawling vines, vegetable, and ornamental plant gardens, and birdcages for the poor canaries. More than a decade ago, it was housing for the site pioneers. When I first got to my place, trash was strewn and ignored all over the street level, or, at least left to the devices of the assigned street cleaner. 

Our street cleaner has his tools in my basement, and that’s where I quietly began my clean-and-tidy-up routine. The boldly marked phone numbers identifying proffered services on my steps and stair walls got the first wash, and the tacked ads on lampposts and walls got the scraper’s touch. My trash picker I got the last time I was in Honolulu (meant as an elders’ shelf bottle grabber) made the first round when no one was watching, but the word got around since I had to register with the police as a foreigner. My neighbors are now careful to put their trash on the designated street bins. I am working on the cigarette butts and discarded packs!

No one in Garapan would cares less about my housing. The aforementioned setting is context to the tuhao in my surroundings. The first ones are noticeably former government officials who took advantage of the subsidized housing when the satellite city was just getting started, retiring with the status symbol of a black sedan. A couple at my first floor landing keep their own parking space cones and are usually seen dusting their hood and swabbing their chromes as often as teens in a Chicago suburb waxed their Corvettes.

The second ones are young couples in the next third generation buildings. One family parks across my kitchen window, their deep grey Toyota SUV equipped with a double sunroof. Pre-school son, visibly the only child, sports a platinum electric mini-Mercedes Benz, which make me suspect that the parents work for the MB factory in Shenyang. (The Audi factory is in Changchun in the next province, which was also Nippon’s car-manufacturing center when they occupied Manchuria.) His parents wipe their vehicle either early in the morning or late afternoon more often than I take a drag on my recently revived smoking habit.

(On my last trip to Saipan, I picked up Dunhill Reds for my Brit neighbor, and ended up keeping it. I suspect that with Shenyang being third to Beijing and Shanghai with PM10-2.5, asthma will get me before cancer puffs my lungs away. Ironic, since I did not succumb to the allure of abundant Mary Jane around Lake Susupe! No promo of tobacco here!)

Mother quipped often that Dad caressed his 60cc Honda first in the morning before he patted her butt. The motorbike was their pride and joy. China’s private car has assumed the same, the symbol of liberation from public inconvenient conveyances. I am now at an age when even the dolled out porcelain beauties offer me their seats in the bus and the Metro. I go public. Not the nouveau riche. To car or not to car, is not at all a question!

The SUV across the street is covered with a reflective foil secured down to the tires so the vehicle does not absorb heat while parked, saving on the air-conditioner. Dust abounding is wiped while the outer sheen is waxed to shine, the hubcaps always immaculate. The couple, always spiffy in their boutique attires from head to toe, do this with religious intensity like ladies fingering their Angelus rosary beads beneath the spires at Gualo Rai!

Private wealth, long accumulated in China, gets displayed in cars. BMW has a new plant in Tiexi that rivals anything Bavaria can offer. To be sure, distributive justice remains a challenge as it is with the rest of the world, but for now, with the country’s stress on domestic consumption, and the countryside population rapidly moving from the farms to the factories, the tuhao v-room reigns regal in the streets.