I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying

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.

• “Youngmi Mayer has the incomparable ability to find something funny in the most life shattering material. She writes with a raw, enviable freedom that simply floors you.”
  Michelle Zauner, New York Times bestselling author of Crying in H Mart
• “Youngmi Mayer’s wit shines as she takes you across a spectrum of emotions, setting you up for heartbreak only to drop-kick you with a laugh. Through an intimate and relatable portrayal of her family’s history, I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying explores all the parts that make us who we are. She’s shown me that there’s a little entitled white guy inside each of us.”
  Sohla El-Waylly, New York Times bestselling author of Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook
• “In her debut memoir, Youngmi Mayer is witty, irreverent, and, at times, astonishingly tender, reminding us all that often, the only rational rebuttal to tragedy, trauma, and heartbreak is laughter.”
  Joanne Molinaro, New York Times bestselling author of The Korean Vegan: Reflections and Recipes from Omma's Kitchen