I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying by Youngmi Mayer w/ John deBary | New Design High School

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Please note that attendees who purchase their book ahead of time (in the ticketing options) will receive priority in the signing line after the book talk, and will have their books signed first! Upon arrival, you will check in with a staff member and receive your number in the signing line. Books will also be available for sale at the event itself, until sold out. Can't make it? Pre-order your signed copy here. Please also consider making a donation with your RSVP! Donations go to Seward Park Campus Library (@SparkCampusLibrary), a proud NYC Public School high school library. Our library serves the five high schools in the building, and in partnership with New Design High School, we have been able to build a podcast/music recording studio to help students build 21st century skills. To that end, we are in the process of building MarkerSpark - a creative Makerspace focused on 3D engineering and design. Your donations are crucial to making this happen. Help us build out the vision of next year's leaders. ABOUT THE BOOK 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. Information Source: Yu and Me Books | eventbrite