For most actors, a supporting role alongside Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett doesn’t usually land on their plate four years after starting out on YouTube – as a rapper. Yet that is exactly what has happened to Nora Lum, AKA Awkwafina. The 29-year-old Queens-born multihyphenate has gone from a job at an air-conditioning company and making beats on the side to being the scrappy wingman to Bullock and Blanchett’s Pitt and Clooney in forthcoming gender-swapped caper Ocean’s 8. This is no small feat. And Lum is as surprised as anyone. “There are definitely people who are confused that I was cast – I was confused. They are a group of idols. But we got along swimmingly.”
While Lum has, since childhood, had an effortless ability to make people laugh. (When asked which characters she would have loved to play, she names My Cousin Vinny, “because we have a similar body type.” That is a good indication of what makes her tick.) But she never really planned on capitalising on it. “I never even expected to be popular on YouTube. I’ve got a lot of people telling me: ‘Oh my God, you’re going to be so famous,’ but people have been telling me that since I had, like, 300 views on YouTube. It’s all subjective …”
That might be true, but it is also to downplay the tremendous potential on display in those videos. Because there really aren’t that many of them. Awkwafina has precisely one viral hit, one album, and one high-profile collab under her belt: respectively, 2013’s My Vag, 2014’s Yellow Ranger and 2016’s Green Tea, with the standup comedian Margaret Cho. As an actor she’s been in a documentary, three TV shows and a couple of indie comedies. Though we shouldn’t neglect to mention Tawk, the excellently unhinged self-made webchat show she hosted from various bodegas around NYC with a boombox-wielding, octogenarian sidekick.
My Vag, the viral hit, perhaps most succinctly showcases what makes her so watchable. She made it on a whim, in a direct albeit strangely belated response to Mickey Avalon’s 2006 My Dick. It’s an epic boast battle that – with bonkers rhymes – pits her bits against a rival’s. “My vag like a operatic ballad / Your vag like Grandpa’s cabbage […] My vag, like tastin’ heaven / Your vag manages a 7-Eleven”. The track understandably caught people’s attention – not all gleeful; some feminists took exception – and gave the rapper a greater understanding of the platform she had stumbled on. “I didn’t mean My Vag to be a feminist message,” she says. “I was just rapping about my own genitalia.”
Awkwafina, who achieved a double major in women’s studies and journalism, is unafraid to speak her mind. And being Asian-American with Chinese and South Korean heritage means that just doing what she does is a political statement. “The existence of someone like me, especially from my earlier videos, when YouTube was a landscape where not a lot of people saw an Asian-American woman being entirely unashamed – save for Cho – is in itself provocative,” she says.
This might go some way to explaining the buzz around her, too: she’s in the right place at the right time. Alongside Ocean’s 8, she has a starring role in what is poised to be one of next year’s more groundbreaking features: the screen adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s best-selling novel, Crazy Rich Asians. Scheduled for release in August 2018, it boasts an all-Asian cast, headed up by Constance Wu, breakout star of sitcom Fresh off the Boat. “These are Asian-American stories – just as American as anything else. I’m an Asian-American kid who didn’t have that when I was growing up.” Of course, as Lum is quick to point out, Crazy Rich Asians is a gamble, because no one knows how Asian leads will do at the box office. Given Lum’s track record, a gamble is probably what suits her best.
