To say that 2018 was a seminal year for Awkwafina would be putting things mildly. Having only been known in certain comedy and music circles until then, she suddenly found herself in the limelight with not one, but two breakthrough movies – Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians. Since then, she’s gone on to become a household name as an actor, creating her own TV show, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, and starring in several blockbusters. Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon, in which she voiced Sisu, were among the quartet of movies she headlined last year.

Indeed, the talented 33-year-old is the very definition of a multi-hyphenate. Actor, comedian, rapper, writer – it seems that everything the New York City native touches turns to gold. But while her life may seem like a fairy tale today, it has been anything but easy…

Grandmotherly Love

Nora Lum – to give the actress her birth name – was born on 2 June 1988 in New York as the sole child of Wally, a Chinese-American, and Tia, a South Korean painter. Tragically, her mum passed away when she was just four, leaving her father and his parents to raise her. If the story sounds familiar, that’s because it closely mirrors the life of her eponymous character in Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, the hit TV series she created for Comedy Central.

Like her fictional role, Nora spent her formative years in the New York borough, and was particularly close to her paternal grandmother. An early role model, the latter signed her up for singing lessons as a child without her father ever knowing. Speaking of this close relationship, the star explains: “My grandmother is everything to me. She taught me that Asian women are strong. They’re not meek orchard-dwelling figures.”

Losing Home

Her grandparents ran a Chinese restaurant in the Flushing area of Queens, but when it began to fail, they had to file for bankruptcy, losing the business as well as their home. At this point, the entire family was forced to move into a tiny apartment, with Lum sharing the sole bedroom with her grandparents until she turned 12. Recalling these troubled times, she notes: “I remember staying up with my grandma at night and asking her, ‘What is the only thing you wish for that you could have right now?’ And she said, ‘To pay the bills.’”

Troubled Teen

Having been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) as well as depression during her teens, Nora was anything but an A-plus pupil. Despite being accepted into the prestigious Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School – an institution famed for churning out musical talents and thespians such as Al Pacino, Jennifer Aniston and Timothée Chalamet – she was, in her estimation, “a bad kid”. She says she would often skip class to drink or smoke with friends, and would always get caught. Thankfully, she managed to scrape together a C-minus average, eventually graduating and – after learning Mandarin in Beijing – making it to the University of Albany.

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Alter Ego

Lum fell in love with music at an early age, learning to play the trumpet when she was in the fifth grade and training in both the jazz and classical traditions. However, it was rap that truly captivated her imagination. She began rapping when she was 13, often recording her own tunes into a boombox mixtape recorder, and three years later picked out her own stage name – Awkwafina.

It wasn’t until Nora was in college, however, that she would fully embrace Awkwafina as her alter ego. Having to temper and filter herself to fit the mould of a ‘proper’ university student, she used that outlandish persona to release the repressed side of her personality. “She’s the girl who’s high on sleepover energy, running around and dunking ice cream cones in her eyes,” shares Lum. “College was like prison reform where I learned to be quiet and more passive – so when Awkwafina comes out on stage, she’s that crazy high-school kid that doesn’t really care about anything. It’s an extra burst of confidence that Nora doesn’t have. There is a duality.”

Bad Rap

Awkwafina may have been rapping and producing her own songs since her teenage years, but her first big break came in 2012 when My Vag became a viral hit on her YouTube channel. Her song’s success – it garnered over three million views – galvanised her into a frenzy of songwriting, and she followed it with the 12-track Yellow Ranger album in 2014, then In Fina We Trust in 2018. She was featured in the rap documentary Bad Rap, an exposé on four Asian-American hip-hop artists, which debuted at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

Awkward Feelings

Having long struggled with depression and her overall mental health, Awkwafina was not shielded from feelings of inadequacy and anxiety when she found fame. Indeed, she points to the summer of that seminal year – 2018 – as being particularly challenging. When Netflix film Dude, Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians were released in a rapid five-month span, the sudden attention and scrutiny caused her to feel displaced.

“That summer, it was a lot of people being like, ‘Just enjoy, dude, just have fun, live in the moment,’” she recalls. “All this stuff started to come up. I wondered at a certain point, when everything in my life was amazing, why I felt so low and with no sense of identity.” Thankfully, she’s now adjusted to her celebrity status.

Farewell Arrival

Not only has she successfully overcome stereotypes and mental health issues, she’s even made acting history. With her 2020 Golden Globe triumph, she became the first-ever performer of Asian descent to win in the Best Actress category (for her poignant portrayal of Billi in The Farewell).

So what’s next for Lum and her wildly successful alter ego? Well, next month sees the barrier-breaking talent lend her voice to animated film The Bad Guys as Ms Tarantula and then to the part of Scuttle the seagull in the 2023 live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid.

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(Text: Tenzing Thondup)