I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying

Stand-up was the perfect medium for me because it required a lot of hard work for very little reward, and I hated reward.

I realized that I have gained a following because I'm willing to openly admit the things that so many people spend their entire lives trying to cover up. A lot of people find it off-putting, but for others, it's a respite from an endless existence of shame. They see me displaying openly something they've been running away from all their lives and feel relief. I also receive a huge benefit from this relationship with people who relate to my material: it makes me feel like I'm not alone and that I'm not crazy. Well, I am crazy, but so are a bunch of other people.

I think Americans of my generation can recognise that the horrible old white people of the silent and boomer generations where victims themselves, and that’s why they continue to perpetuate harm on to other people, however, the disgusting nature of white supremacy is to take the original pain of abuse and amplifie it to terrifying degrees onto other people. The entire world is full of people of all backgrounds were victims of abuse but we didn’t run off and join the Nazi party like my grandpa’s siblings because of it. We didn’t cause more destruction from this initial destruction. Or did we? When I see a video of some old white boomer going absolutely apeshit racist on an innocent bystander at the gas station or on the subway, I see this look in their eyes that is familiar to me. It’s the look I’ve seen in the early moments my mother had while beating me, during the rage of it before she broke out with laughter or crying. People who are not white didn’t have the option of joining a political party formed around their supremacy to inflict their pain on to someone else who didn’t look like them, so they took that harm and inflicted it on themselves and their own people. The victim is the perpetrator in a sense that the energy needs to go somewhere, and sometimes it goes inside rather than outside.

The interesting thing about rebellion and children is that for them to want it, they need an adult to provide not only an oppressive force, but also a sense of security. They need to have something to fight against but also to know that whatever happens it’ll be ok.

For a non-Korean speaker it might seem strange that Koreans refer to their own children with the derogatory term for “a child of a beast”, but there’s two meanings in how Koreans use 새끼 saekki for their child - they’re being derogatory by admitting that we’re nothing but animals, but they’re also saying that being nothing but an animal is the highest honor of all. The most sophisticated and profound emotion a human can feel is the most common and bonds us to everything that has ever lived and reproduced: love of child. People who have kids like to say there’s no way to describe what it feels like to have a child to someone who doesn’t have a child, I feel the same way but I also don’t. Having a baby is strange in that it is something you’ve never felt before, but it’s also the only thing you’ve ever felt before. Having a baby makes you feel love and fear death, but it’s not because those things are taught to you, they are reactivated in you. Having a baby isn’t learning, it’s realising you’ve already known everything all along.

As a Korean, when meeting a Korean adoptee, I feel a negative charge. It feels like rubbing the wrong parts of two batteries together, a painful repelling that is supposed to be an attraction. Korean adoptees have told me time and time again that they feel abandoned and neglected. But what they do not know is that Koreans also feel a longing for them - the longing for the lost child, the lost sibling, like when people look at the Taegeuk and see the dividing line and ignore the fact that a circle binds them together. A big reason I married Danny was because I needed to show him that we all missed him. I needed to accept him with the open arms denied me so many times by Koreans.

I read books by Hemingway, Nabokov, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald —you know, The Men™—all before my tenth birthday. This was really formative for me because it made me a pompous asshole and also caused some severe anxiety.

We know what it means when white people can't tell us apart. It means that they can throw us away.

Every year, since the invention of papyrus, like ten thousand college professor white guys write a book about how hot sixteen-year-old girls are. But none of them every seem to think, Wait has someone does this before? None of them ever seem to think that they're dumbass losers who maybe need to shut the fuck up. So why would I think that?

I think for a lot of people who really want kids and can’t have them, this is one of the more painful parts of their loss. The idea that they don’t even know what it is they lost. I wish there was a way to communicate that it is a profound loss but also a profound gift to never be a parent. Yes, it’s true. Not having a kid means missing out on a type of love that I like every other parent consider the deepest love of all, but it also means missing out on the most terrifying fear - the fear of death. Not your death, but something way worse - the death of your child. This is a disgusting feeling. It tethers humans to existence in a torturous way. It turns cool, sarcastic people into Ernest try Hards. It makes hard people soft. It makes people cry at TV commercials. Not knowing this fear is worth never having a child. Having a kid is being hit by the truck that is life. Watching this truck pass you by might it seem sad, but then again, you’re not getting hit by a fucking truck.

There was nothing worse than being under the power of a powerless man. Nothing was worth the gold of a troll, their gifts were curses.

But by staying in unhappy situations, these women teach their children the extremely harmful lesson that their lives are supposed to be like that. They teach them that misery is to be expected and that happiness isn't worth fighting for.