Quotessence
Home / Authors / Youngmi Mayer Biography

Youngmi Mayer Biography

Author

Related Quotes

“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.”

PainRace
Book:I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying
Create image

“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.”

ChildrenKorean
Book:I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying
Create image

“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.”

KoreanAdopteesKorean American
Book:I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying
Create image