New York City-based standup comedian Youngmi Mayer is known for her viral funny and relatable content on TikTok. She’s also an author who recently came out with her first memoir I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying. It unpacks her childhood growing up in Saipan as she struggled with her Korean American identity.

The standup, podcast host and author is known for her witty content on social media. During the COVID lockdown, she quickly became TikTok famous and now has a reach of over a half-million followers with her content garnering millions of views.

"To be honest," she admitted, "I started my TikTok because during COVID; I couldn’t go out and do stand up anymore. So I was like I’ll just make TikToks with my standup jokes. But because it’s so easy to reach a very large audience on TikTok very quickly, it sort of blew up way faster than my standup career had at that point because at that point I had been doing standup comedy for two years."

Mayer is unafraid to call out Asian stereotypes and casual racism, often turning them on its head, all while sporting bubblegum pink hair and raising a son as a single mom. Others might recognize her in relation to Mission Chinese Food in San Francisco, a popular restaurant she opened with her ex-husband.

But most recently, she published her memoir where she unpacks her childhood growing up in Saipan as a biracial kid far from ‘home’.

"When I was 6 years old, I moved to Saipan from Korea, where even though I am Korean and I am half-white. Just because of that, I was seen as very different than everybody else," she explained.

But as her followers may know, Saipan always felt more like home than Korea, as she said, "Obviously, I knew that was my experience growing up as a child, but when I started writing the book it really surprised me how much it affected the person I am today. I think that’s because all of the time I spent in Korea were my very formative years. Looking back, I was like ‘Oh, all of these things I experienced and all these personality traits that I thought were sort of inherent and unique to my personality and part of who I am as a person.’

"Now having written that experience as a child and going through that very foundational period of my life where I felt abject rejection from the whole society, it really made a huge mark on who I am as a person."

Now, she finds laughter and pain go hand-in-hand. In fact, it’s her definition of comedy that’s a homage of sorts to her roots. "The title of the book, 'I’m laughing because I’m crying', is from a popular Korean phrase which is ‘If you laugh while crying, hair will grow out of your butthole’, which I talk about in the book," she said whimsically.

The common Korean phrase became her vehicle to plot out the main theme of her book with the idea that comedy and crying gel “like yin and yang” .

She told KUAM News, "I guess the phrase itself doesn’t mean comedy comes from sadness, but I thought that I could use that phrase as a basis to bounce off that idea. Because for me personally and I think for a lot of comedians, maybe just for the concept of humor in general, I think a lot of people develop humor in order to combat and soothe themselves from these very negative emotions."

She recently wrapped up her book tour in the West Coast in December. Her East Coast tour will continue this April kicking-off at Joe’s Pub in New York City where she’ll debut a one-person show.

As for what’s next for her, Mayer said, "I’m also working on possibly a second book about dating and being a single mom, which I feel like is also one of those things that are very unrelatable until you hear about it and it sounds like everybody else’s story when you read about it."