I'm laughing because I'm crying

""Do you know what happens if you laugh while crying? Hair grows out of your butthole." So went the saying Youngmi Mayer's mother would recite-a saying Youngmi didn't take to but lived through in every situation: laughing and crying at a funeral, laughing and crying at her family's traumatic history, even laughing and crying as her mother berated her for taking too long to put her socks back on. And it is with her mother's words and Youngmi's brash wit and irreverence that takes readers through I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying and into the complexities of her identity as an offbeat biracial kid in Saipan, a place next to a place that Americans might know. It takes us through an adolescence where she has to parent her own parents: a mother who married her husband because he looked like Jesus and also The Bee Gees (all of them). And, she takes us through a century of colonialism and war in Korea and how that has shaped her family and now, a hundred years later, still affects her in New York City as a queer single mom, all the while interrogating whiteness, gender, and sexuality. And she may make you cry, but most of all, she wants you to laugh. Because 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. So, here it is. She hopes it makes you laugh while crying. And she hopes it makes you grow hair out of your butthole"--