Youngmi Mayer

San Francisco Chronicle's Best New Books of Fall 2024 From standup comedian Youngmi Mayer, an unforgettable memoir written with “raw, enviable freedom that simply floors you,” interrogating whiteness, gender, and sexuality in America, navigating a tumultuous childhood in Korea and Saipan, and coming to terms with her parents’ shortcomings (Michelle Zauner). “Do you know what happens if you laugh while crying? Hair grows out of your butthole.” It was a constant truism Youngmi Mayer’s mother would say threateningly after she would make her daughter laugh while crying. Her mother used it to cheer her up in moments when she could tell Youngmi was overtaken with grief. The humorous saying would never fail to lighten the mood, causing both daughter and mother to laugh and cry at the same time. Her mother had learned this trick from her mother, and her mother had learned this from her mother before her: it had also helped an endless string of her family laugh through suffering. In I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, Youngmi jokes through the retelling of her childhood as an offbeat biracial kid in Saipan, a place next to a place that Americans might know. She jokes through her difficult adolescence where she must parent her own parents: a mother who married her husband because he looked like white Jesus (and the singer of The Bee Gees). And with humor and irreverence and full-throated openness, she jokes even while sharing the story of what her family went through during the last century of colonialism and war in Korea, while reflecting how years later, their wounds affect her in New York City as a single mom, all the while interrogating whiteness, gender, and sexuality. Youngmi jokes through these stories in hopes of passing onto the reader what her family passed down to her: The gift of laughing while crying. The gift of a hairy butthole. Because throughout it all, the one thing she learned was one cannot exist without the other. And like a yin and yang, this duality is reflected in this whip-smart, heart-wrenching, and disarmingly funny memoir told by a bright new voice with so much heart and wisdom.

A Memoir

I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying

Krystal

We know what it means when white people can't tell us apart. It means that they can throw us away.

All of us do things every day that don't belong to us.

When adults who are children have children of their own, they mistake them for their parents who were never there. I was the adult. My parents were the children.

Her vibe was medium. She was a medium-sized, medium-colored, medium-length-haired medium girl.

The interesting thing about rebellion in children is that for them to want it, they need an adult to provide not only an oppressive force but also a sense of security. They need to have something to fight against, but also to know that whatever happens, it'll be ok.

Imagine the betrayal he would feel at the break in their contract: the unspoken contract between racist, misogynistic men and the child lovers and wives they find in Asia to dominate with their "superior" knowledge. Her one job was to not know the things he knew. 

There's nothing wrong with being a freak, but there's something so very wrong about pretending to be a normie when you're a freak.

As a child, I couldn't help but see my mother as a savior and my father as a bum. As an adult, I can see that both of their reactions—my father's inability to do anything and my mother's frantic inability to sit still for a second-were caused by mental illness and out of their control.

There is no biracial community made up of biracials speaking their own biracial language in every major city like there are for other ethnic groups.

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