Sunday, April 25, 2004
"Chinamens Ears"
"What is that?"I asked increduously. The girl appeared to be working a sharp-looking stick into her eardrum.
"Cleaning my ears," she said, continuing the deep, dangerous-looking probe while I cringed. She nonchalantly returned my fearful gaze and asked "Haven't you ever seen this before?"
I emphatically shook my head.
Over the next few months I learned about this stick.
The tool doesn't really have a name but Chinese people know it as a "wa ee zai gon go" which, funnily enough, translates roughly as "stick for scooping muck out of ears". It's a thin foot-long wooden stick that bends slightly into a flat scoop at one end and has a fluff-ball on the other end.
For Chinese people, I was told, the tool is standard issue, maybe at birth.
The idea is that after you've finished scooping with one end, you twirl the thing around and brush away any yucky left-over items with the fluff ball.
And it works like a charm.
It took me months to work up the courage to try it. When I finally did, it was with extreme trepidation and only on the condition that my expert friend do the scooping for me. "What if there's an earthquake?" I inquired, many times.
The amount of disgusting stuff that came out of my ears was jaw-dropping.
Over many years of cleaning my ears with cotton buds, I have never ever seen such dramatic results as those gotten with the stick on almost every occasion. Once over the fear of puncture, one can actually grow to enjoy scraping away layers that, inevitably and surreptitiously, grow on the ear's thin protective membrane.
It's funny, but every time I use it I can't help but think back to my early childhood days.
My grandparents especially, and people of their generation, had a standard line for admonishing naughty children with a penchant for sticking into their mouths any small item that would fit.
"Don't do that," they would say, "It's been in Chinamen's ears."
Which seemed, at the time, like a funny thing to say. Of course it didn't stop me putting things into my mouth. But it sure made me wonder what adventures each targeted coin and nick-nack might have had.
How strange it is to realize, as a "gwailo" adult, that if the coins were able to speak they might have confirmed that Chinese ears are perhaps the cleanest of all.
