Last year my good friend Dave told me about an unusual experience he had after getting a haircut in Vietnam. The barber asked him if he wanted something additional done. Though he didn’t know what the barber had offered, Dave is always game for cultural experiences, so he said yes. “Next thing you know”, he said, “the barber was sticking dental instruments into my ears”. Now, I don’t know about you, but I remember being told when growing up that you shouldn’t stick anything into your ear that is sharper than your elbow.

At this point, I think it’s important to add that the barbershop that Dave chose was nothing more than a chair placed on the sidewalk facing a wall with a small mirror hanging from a nail. You can see why I like Dave. He likes to try these unique experiences when traveling to foreign places. What shocked me was not so much that he was getting his ears cleaned with dental instruments but that it was happening on the side of a busy road. I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if a bus backfired or someone bumped into the barber while walking down the street.

I don’t imagine there’s a whole lot of recourse if you get your eardrum punctured while having a surgical procedure done on the side of the road in Vietnam. In this case, I’d actually have to side in favor of the insurance company’s claim denial.

That was my knowledge of Vietnamese ear cleaning when I commented to Joan that I thought one of my ears was plugged up. I’d been wearing ear plugs to help me sleep for the previous week, and while they do the job of keeping noise out, they also keep ear wax in. Since experiencing an uncomfortable case of swimmer’s ear a couple years ago due to wax build up, I occasionally use ear drops to break up and flush out the wax, but this time, it wasn’t working very well. Since we were in Vietnam, I decided to give this unusual practice a try. Unlike Dave, I chose to have the procedure done in a hygienic environment.

Influenced by Chinese medicine, ear cleaning is practiced in many Asian cultures, including China, Japan, and Korea. Personal hygiene was crucial in hot, humid climates like Vietnam’s, and ear cleaning became part of a broader self-care regimen. It began as a practical, home-based activity within families, where elders cleaned children’s ears. What started as a family ritual has evolved into a luxury spa service with calming environments, gentle techniques, and soothing music or sometimes a streetside barber with the sound of car horns to provide ambiance.

All in One Care Shop in Saigon offers ear cleaning, and I booked an appointment with a staff member who was described as having the most experience. When I arrived, I was offered warm tea while I sat in the waiting room listening to the kind of comfortable music you expect at a spa.

The girl came out, and invited me to follow her to the procedure room. It pretty much looked the same as the examining room you find in a medical office, and she asked me to lie down on the table. She placed a warm eye mask over my face. It smelled of incense, which I found a soothing distraction. She then began the procedure.

The first thing she did was to shave the hair off my ear lobes with a tiny blade connected to the end of what looked like a dental instrument. Once she shaved the outside, she began to work her way into the ear canal, removing hairs that could be gathering places for dirt and dust.

She then put something that felt like a moistened q-tip in my ear, presumably to loosen up any wax deposits. Once my ear canal was lubricated, she reached in with tweezers and after a couple seconds, I heard a gasp. She lifted my eye mask to show me a reddish-brown clump of earwax that was almost a half inch in diameter. Well, that explains why my ears felt plugged up, and apparently the darker the wax, the longer it has been sitting in your ear.

Things went fairly smoothly after that, with her scraping the edges of my ear canal. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that didn’t produce any gold nuggets like the first probe. There were a couple painful pokes but nothing that felt like it was going to puncture an ear drum. When the girl finished the procedure, she again removed my mask and displayed a cloth with all of the filth she’d dug out of my ear. Like dirty mop water, you can’t help but be simultaneously delighted and disgusted with everything that’s been cleaned up.

She took me back to the lobby, offered me another tea, and told me to relax as long as I wanted. I sat there marveling at what had been pulled out of my ear, and imagined I was hearing better. I think my ear canal was just a little swollen and irritated by the dirt that had been trapped in there for who knows how long so I wasn’t actually hearing any better quite yet.

I have to admit, it was a bit scary letting someone stick sharp metal objects into my ear, but I can’t deny the results. What I’d been unable to do after flushing with fluid for months, this professional ear cleaner was able to do with her assortment of tools in just 20 minutes. And the cost? About $15 U.S. dollars.