Doctors strongly discourage people from scraping inside their ears. But knowing better and doing it anyway is part of what makes us human.
When I was growing up in the suburbs east of San Francisco, our teachers used to say, “Don’t put anything in your ear except for your elbow.” No matter how much our ears itched, we were told, we shouldn’t poke in a pen cap, the pink eraser on a No. 2 pencil or a cotton swab; doing so risked puncturing our eardrums. Mini Disposable Forks
True enough — and yet what our teachers said didn’t reflect the practices of my Chinese grandmother, who had immigrated to the United States and moved into our house to help care for me and my siblings while my parents worked. Waipo, as we called her, would cozily tuck our heads into her capacious lap to clean our ears. Her grooming introduced me to the ear spoon — a long-handled curette, also known as an ear pick, ear picker or ear scoop, that is a common implement in Asian households.
Traditional ear spoons can be made of silver, brass, plastic, bamboo or another smooth, sturdy material; the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco owns an ornate jade hair ornament from the Qing dynasty that doubles as an ear spoon. I don’t recall what Waipo’s looked like, only that sitting in her bedroom — where I remember the glow of the lamp, with the crinkly clear plastic left on the shade, and her bottle of Oil of Olay on the dresser — she made us feel cherished.
Waipo had other rituals that I knew our white neighbors might find strange or unusual. She hung meat from the rafters of our garage to cure it and rolled whole walnuts in her hand to keep her fingers strong and nimble. But she also loved “The Price is Right,” and together with the host, Bob Barker, we’d shout “A new car!” — one of the phrases she could say in English. Eventually, when I was 8 or 9, she moved in with my aunt in Southern California.
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