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So far this year, the Chinatown crystals shop Magic Jewelry has only captured seven rainbow auras on film. “It’s very rare and powerful,” the woman behind the counter tells the comedian, podcaster, and soon-to-be author Youngmi Mayer on a recent October afternoon. Mayer and I—in the time-honored tradition of New York skeptics who don’t mind an occasional sign from the universe—have come to the shop to have our aura photos taken. This woman, it seems, is level-setting with us. Maybe we shouldn’t expect too much.
The Fujifilm brightens quickly. My aura, apparently, reveals itself as a staid wash of green and blue. But when we uncover Mayer’s aura photo, the three of us gasp at the bright riot of color. A rainbow! The woman interprets this as a sign of power. “Your influence is growing,” she tells Mayer. In short: The vibes are objectively auspicious.
But Mayer doesn’t need some electrophotographic woo-woo to know that. After her departure from the Mission Chinese universe—the pop-up restaurant turned controversial 2010s food-world phenom that she helped her then-husband, the celeb chef Danny Bowien, found—Mayer has undergone a full pivot. After her high-flying, Birkin-bedecked life as a member of restaurant royalty, then her divorce from Bowien in 2018, Mayer threw herself, to even her therapist’s surprise, into comedy. She’s since made a name for herself in both the IRL stand-up scene and the online one, her inimitable brand of messy biracial single-mom humor something your most plugged-in Asian friends would describe, admiringly, as pure diasporic chaos.
Across the internet, and especially on TikTok, where she has more than half a million followers, Mayer plays the part of a sly, snarky devil sitting on the shoulder of prim Asian-American consciousness. She steamrolls over palatable lunchbox story tropes in favor of jokes about race and trauma and shame and the bajillion inexplicable things white people are forever doing that you absolutely will not get unless you, perhaps in a gasp of recognition, get it. But Mayer is also a self-deprecator to the extreme: In her standup and podcasting, you get the sense she’s fascinated by the shock—and value—of uninhibited disclosure. (Her podcast, FYI, is called “Hairy Butthole.”). On November 12, her upcoming debut memoir, I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, will be published; at a packed Brooklyn warehouse earlier this summer, Mayer gave fans a preview by dryly comparing having an abortion to “throwing away the first pancake,” moments before she wept whilst reading from a chapter about her dying Korean grandfather.
“It’s gotten me nothing to pander to white people in my life—nothing,” Mayer tells me. After the Magic Jewelry rainbow-aura revelation, we’ve meandered to Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles with the goal of toasting Tsingtaos. “I think the privilege that I have is that I came up this weird way, not somewhere a white boss was going to ‘not like’ what I said.” She chuckles. “It’s really fun to be like, ‘Fuck you. You really want to hear about how we feel about you? Because I’m not going to do the ‘piano playing’ story!’”
For lunch, Mayer has dressed loud: She sports pink hair and a pastel Opening Ceremony sweater that she’s snipped into a jaunty crop top herself. But in conversation, she’s quiet and self-assured—she has the composure of someone who’s, for better and for worse, seen it all and couldn’t care less. (“Look at how I’m sitting! I’m like an old Korean man,” she jokes, folding her leg in on the chair. “It’s a hip opener!”). After a tumultuous childhood in Korea and Saipan, she moved to San Francisco at age 20 with $700 in her pocket, with which she scrapped it out in a Tenderloin-district apartment until she met Bowien.
They married in 2008; during the first weeks of Mission Chinese’s launch in 2010, Mayer was the restaurant’s only server. The rest is Bourdain-inflected history—another world entirely (though she does still work shifts at the latest Mission Chinese pop-up) that registers almost as a blip on Mayer’s actual life. (Does she miss it, though? “Not at all,” she says, cackling. “I was literally talking to one of my old restaurant friends, and we were both like, ‘If I have to eat one more fucking three-Michelin-starred fine dining meal that’s five hours long, I will kill myself.’ It’s the most unfun thing I’ve ever had to sit through in my life.”)
That’s where the memoir comes in. The joke, as it often is for diasporic types, is that I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying is a book-length answer to the most cursed of questions: Where are you from? a.k.a. what’s your deal? a.k.a. how should you be categorized? This is the tension that Mayer has grappled with since childhood, back when being a careful student of social structure was a survival skill in rigid Korean society. The book is her life story, flushed out in painful detail, with frank diversions about abuse, drug use, suicidal ideation, and the effects of generations-deep trauma paired with brutal observations about status and power. (Early in the book, Mayer writes with an almost flippant deadpan: “We know what it means when white people can’t tell us apart. It means that they can throw us away.”). It is horrific as it is hilarious; in a chapter where she reimagines how her mother’s teenaged suicide attempt had been interrupted by a nosy neighbor, she writes, “My mother lifted her head, her desire to die not as strong as her desire not to get her ass beat.”
I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, which Mayer wrote between 2022 and 2023, is her first major venture into writing since she was in high school. But this is a rare moment when Mayer doesn’t self-deprecate: She tells me she always knew she could write, but it wasn’t until Mayer ventured into comedy (and that sister industry of over-sharing, podcasting) that she realized she could do something interesting—maybe even radical for the burgeoning Asian American consciousness—by opening up about her life.
Between “Hairy Butthole,” which she has hosted since 2022, and the “Feeling Asian” podcast, which Mayer hosted with the comedian Brian Park from 2019 to 2022 (which, full disclosure, I was a guest on once), Mayer has spent years openly discussing her personal life and all of its rags-to-riches contradictions. The resulting effect makes Mayer feel familiar and authentic, like a newly liberated Cinderella in possession of hilarious self-awareness. Nothing is off-limits to discuss, and that temerity becomes useful—and contagious—for then interviewing Asian American luminaries like Cathy Park Hong, Ke Huy Quan, and Margaret Cho in what usually turn out to be heavy discussions about identity and trauma. In the wake of the wave of anti-Asian hate crimes during COVID, these conversations offered something like group therapy by proxy.
Mayer’s work embodies a growing sentiment among current generations of Asian Americans who, now equipped with a broader understanding of mental health (and, perhaps, copies of The Body Keeps The Score), are interested in deep, interior excavation, in hopes of intergenerational healing. The work is in the reckoning: “We all need to really cry about stuff that happened to our families,” as Mayer says. “Everyone hears their parents’ stories told very casually, because they don’t want to scare you or whatever.” She refers back to the story of her mother’s suicide attempt. “She’s told me that story so many times, and she laughs when she tells that. But writing about it, I was like, Yeah, that’s so fucked up. I don’t think I ever fully recognized the big emotions.” By naming the thing—and then making a lot of fun of the thing—Mayer defuses the horror.
“I was struggling for a long time when I started doing stand-up, in terms of figuring out like, why do I deserve to talk? Why do I deserve a platform?” Mayer explains. “But then what I ended up realizing was that my being open creates room for somebody else to be open and to feel okay sharing. Now people reach out to me and want to tell me everything about themselves. ‘Enjoy’ is a weird word, but not only do I enjoy hearing people’s stories, but it feels like I owe them that. You know what I mean?” She curls her lip up, unable to resist a wisecrack. “I also do like hearing about drama.”
Before we part ways, I ask Mayer about what feels like a “good life” to her these days, now that her journey has brought her to downtown New York, where she ducks in and out of stand-up caverns, co-parenting her 10-year-old son (and occasionally having him on the podcast), and scrapping as hard as ever. As her memoir goes to show, Youngmi Mayer has spent her whole life starting over. This part has still only just begun. Isn’t she scared?
She lets the flinty look in her eye soften, just for a beat. “Until I was 33, I never pursued anything, because I just didn’t think I was going to be good enough,” Mayer says finally. “I know a lot of people live their entire lives like that. It’s by far the worst feeling in the world, I think.” Worse than bombing onstage, worse than riling up trolls online, worse than putting your entire life out in a book and asking people to read it. There are fates worse than freedom. “I would rather be at a dive bar telling my dumb jokes than sitting at Noma,” Mayer says, laughing. Outside, she hugs me good-bye, and then she starts walking home.
Delia Cai is a writer living in Brooklyn. She runs the media and culture newsletter, Deez Links.