You Know Awkwafina, But Have You Met Nora Lum?

From Harper's BAZAAR

Awkwafina is introducing me to the wide world of slime. It’s similar to the art of taking an edible: The key is restraint. “At first it’s not going to immediately solidify,” she says as she instructs me to pour Elmer’s slime activator into a bowl of glue. “So you’re going to be, ‘I need more!’ Like edibles. And then what happens is, it turns into this really gross-feeling piece of shit.” We both pop some edibles and start stirring.

She’s been into slime for a few years now. She even has what she calls her Slime Center—a variety of plastic bags filled with beads, foam balls of varying sizes, molding clay—that she brought with her when she moved to Los Angeles from New York a couple of years ago. On one November day over Zoom, she’s decided to go all out experimenting with glow-in-the-dark glue that she’ll eventually add white foam balls and glitter to. I show her my bowl of white gloop. “You gotta get some color up in there,” she observes.

“If you have any kind of shaving cream, this changes the game,” she continues. “It’ll give it a nice smell and a nice consistency, make it all a bit smoother to handle.” As I fold the shaving cream into the bowl, the slime eventually swallows it up, becoming softer and slightly puffy. The magic of slime is that you can put anything in it—essential oils, lotion, lube—and it incorporates into itself. You can choose the color, add volume or texture. Once she added in fake, crunchy snow to create a surround-sound experience. (The audio component is important.)

“You can just keep adding whatever the fuck you want and it’ll keep changing,” she says.

“Like ‘Awkwafina’?” I suggest.

“Oh, my God. I did not plan that at all,” she says, laughing. “But, yeah.”

Sure, maybe the edibles are kicking, but just go with it: What better metaphor for the persona of Awkwafina than slime? Born Nora Lum, “Awkwafina” was just a high school nickname that her friend Kim made up (Kim’s was “Kimbo”). After graduation, Awkwafina became the funny, smart-alecky rapper who achieved Internet fame with the song “My Vag” in 2012. Instead of ending up a passing curiosity in the footnotes of Asian American pop culture, the Awkwafina brand grew. She began to star in movies—like extremely big ones alongside extremely famous people, as in holy-shit-it’s-Rihanna-famous, in Ocean’s 8; and then historic ones like Crazy Rich Asians and small, critically beloved ones like The Farewell, which led to a Golden Globe for Best Actress last year.

Awkwafina has become only more ubiquitous since, popping up in everything from her own Comedy Central series, Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens, and four-quadrant blockbusters like Jumanji: The Next Level to commercials for Google’s Pixel phone. The pace will just ramp up­—­she’ll appear in Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid; a Netflix comedy with Sandra Oh, in which they play sisters; and the Apple TV+ movie Swan Song, starring Mahershala Ali. “Yes, I always feel impostor syndrome because there are so many talented people out there,” she says. “But I’m not going to today because I worked really fucking hard.”

Her exponentially increasing fame as Awkwafina, though, creates a tension: The slime takes on a life of its own, like in Flubber or The Blob. Awkwafina is an invention that is both an extension of herself and a creation that exists independently in the world. She introduces herself to people by her birth name, even as most of the planet knows her as Awkwafina. At times she talks about both Awkwafina and Nora in the third person. “There is a duality,” she explains. “One is a stage name that entertains, and the other sleeps, eats, pees in the morning, and does normal things.”

As A24 was starting to release Lulu Wang’s film The Farewell, in which Awkwafina stars as Billi, a Chinese American woman who travels to China to see her dying grandmother, the question of billing became a small flash point. Should the movie poster credit her as Awkwafina or as Nora Lum? “I, from the beginning, had said that we are not casting Awkwafina; we’re casting Nora,” says Wang. “Ultimately, everyone on the financial management side felt that we couldn’t sell the film as well if people didn’t know exactly who she was, and that her face wasn’t enough. And so it would be a missed opportunity if we didn’t use Awkwafina. Philosophically, I wish that we had gone with Nora Lum.”

“It wasn’t the time,” says Lum. “I’d been Awkwafina in my first movie, I’d been Awkwafina in my first YouTube video. I haven’t had the kind of sign that it’s my time yet to be like, ‘It’s Nora now.’ I wonder what it will take to get me there. I still feel like I have a lot to learn on this journey.”

The conversation inevitably turns existential. After all, since Awkwafina is her own invention, isn’t everything Awkwafina does a part of Nora? Still, she feels the schism, in part because Awkwafina was a way for her to push past her depression and ADD—aspects of her mental health she has had to manage since she was a teenager. “Awkwafina is still someone that comes without all of the layers of anxiety. She is more confident than Nora,” she says. “Nora does hide behind her still. I don’t see how Nora exists in Awkwafina’s world yet. I don’t see how I could have done this without Awkwafina, which is weird.”

Even on the set of Crazy Rich Asians, the director, Jon M. Chu, noticed the split. When the cameras were rolling, Lum was doing a huge, chatterbox performance as Peik Lin, and afterward she would be quieter and want to make sure people were happy. “She was so nervous,” Chu remembers of shooting Lum’s first scene for the film. “That confidence was on when we shot, and not on when we cut.”

We hold our respective slimes up to the camera. Mine looks like yellow spray foam insulation or fake cellulite in a plastic surgeon’s office; hers, misty blue with white speckles, looks like planet Earth from an astronaut’s perspective. She adds a “signature” to it—a little smiley face, and tops it off with a “George Washington wig” of shaving cream.

“The thing is, though,” she says, looking at the slime, “whatever you start with won’t change that much.”

Lately Lum has been having recurring nightmares. She wakes up in strange places that have become her new homes: casinos, shopping malls, a cabin in the woods, random Airbnbs. But one of the worst versions of the dream, she says, was when she was actually home, that is, her grandmother’s apartment in Queens, where she grew up. “I came into the bedroom, and my grandma was crying on the bed, ‘You left me here all these years.’ ”

It doesn’t take an analyst to interpret the dreams. She spends half the year traveling for work, and as her star ascends, she has less time to see her family. Even our conversations begin within a small window in between projects after she got back from Australia, where she had been shooting Shang-Chi. L.A. is ostensibly home, but she doesn’t have a feel for it. The streets are unfamiliar, and everyone keeps talking about Jon & Vinny’s, like she’s supposed to know what that is.

When Lum drives in New York, she has road rage. Real, unquenchable road rage that consumes her. Partially, it’s a reaction to the world. The bad-Asian-driver stereotype is a real thing to confront. Even though she knows the streets of Queens like the back of her hand, other drivers will cut her off, yell at her, and she’ll yell back. When she drives with her grandmother in the passenger seat, they have a bit to defend themselves: Lum prompts her grandma to call the police, and her grandma pretends to do it. “People would pick on us. People pick on Asian drivers. The most times I’ve been called ‘chink’ is out of a car window, being yelled at,” she says. “So fuck them.”

One time she was driving when a guy cut her off, so she went and cut him off. “We got to a two-way road where he was able to pass me a little bit, and I rolled down my window and I was like, ‘You going to cut me off, you stupid bitch?’ A really unhinged, crazy-person yell. And his face, it went …” Her jaw drops like a cartoon. “I just saw his face turn. And my grandma saw it too. It was this turn of ‘Oh!’ ”

It’s that surprise—the “Oh!”—that makes her so refreshing. She wasn’t the “Asian girl” you might see onscreen but the one ditching class and smoking on the corner. Her charisma came from herself: the froggy voice and slacker energy. “My whole life has been spent with people having an idea of what I’m about to be, where I come from, how I was raised,” she says. “I’ve spent my entire life walking into a room surprising them.”

“She’s someone who feels familiar, but then there’s also some fun, shiny wrapping of novelty around her where it’s like, ‘Oh, wait, have we seen something like this?’ ” says Bowen Yang, the Saturday Night Live cast member who plays Lum’s cousin on Nora From Queens. “This is the real crucible in East Asian representation, where it’s like you are a Rorschach test for everybody. Everybody. Not even just Asian people. They will see what they want to see when they look at you, and they go, ‘Hmm.’ She had to make sure that she was holding on to some sense of self because everyone else in the world was trying to attach and hang certain things on her.”

Lum grew up in Queens, raised mostly by her Chinese grandmother on her father’s side. Her mother, a Korean immigrant, died when she was four years old. Money was tight as she was growing up. Her grandparents had gone bankrupt and lost their restaurant and house. They moved to a one-bedroom apartment, where she slept in the same room with them until she was 12. “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.’ ”

Lum was, in her estimation, “a bad kid.” She regularly skipped class to drink or smoke weed or cigarettes. She always got caught. She was diagnosed with ADD and depression. She had a C-minus average and barely graduated from high school. “I was the class clown that would do things that no one would ever do,” she says. (Yes, she went to LaGuardia, the Fame school.) “I would raise my hand and say stupid things, like the equivalent of ‘Fuck her right in the puss.’ ” Her peers would follow more conventional routes­—college, then office jobs. She traveled for a year in China, and eventually went to SUNY Albany. After graduating, she got a job working in book publicity. It was hard not to compare herself to others—the ones who seemed to get fulfillment from white-collar professionalism. She felt unmoored, and maybe that there wasn’t much else for her. She says she felt in so many ways that she was “surrendering to this future that I was not good at anything. I always felt like I was the one that people had low expectations for.”

Throughout this time, she started becoming obsessive about music, buying equipment, producing beats, and writing lyrics. It would give her enough motivation to muscle through her day job. She recorded a music video for “My Vag” on her 24th birthday at the suggestion of a friend, Court Dunn. She was hesitant at first. “I was scared I was going to get fired, which I did,” she says. “Not because they saw it, but just because I was a horrible assistant.”

When it dropped, “My Vag” got picked up by The Hairpin, which led to more coverage in the feminist blogosphere, and then a gig performing at Sarah Lawrence, which earned her a check for $1,500. “It was the most money I had ever made, had ever seen at one time in my entire life,” she says. She quit her job working at a vegan deli and booked another gig, performing at Bust magazine’s anniversary party. She decided she would try to keep doing this. “I went into this mode of, if I can make $500 a month, that’s all I need, because that’s how much my rent was at the time,” she recalls. “To this day I feel like I’m still in that ‘All I need is 500-a-month’ mindset.”

Those might have been the golden years. Looking back on it, Lum, now 32, says she loved the days when she had a fake e-mail so she could pretend to be her own fake manager named Edward. “I made just enough, and I was able to do something that I loved doing so much. I just wanted it so bad,” she says. “The truth is that the best years of your life are when you’re waiting for something big to happen.”

One summer night in 2017, Lum was on the rooftop of the hotel in Kuala Lumpur where the cast and crew of Crazy Rich Asians were staying during production. She was hanging out with her costar Henry Golding, who was making his feature film debut, when the director, Jon M. Chu, asked them if they wanted to see some early cuts of their scenes. “I wanted to show them it’s working,” Chu says. Lum “got very emotional. She’s like, ‘I have never seen myself in a movie before.’ I was like, ‘You just shot Ocean’s 8.What are you talking about?’ She’s like, ‘Yeah, I never saw any of those scenes. It still feels like I don’t know what I’m doing, and it doesn’t exist.’ ”

Lum remembers that night; the whole experience felt unreal, she says. “I was doing this movie called Crazy Rich Asians with actual celebrities that I idolized. I remember walking around Singapore in these malls being like, ‘I can’t afford anything in these malls.’ And then seeing these crazy houses. And it’s like literally, ‘Who am I?’ ” she says. “Those were the days. It just felt like I must be really lucky to be here.”

The summer of 2018 was when Awkwafina went through the looking glass: Three feature films—Ocean’s 8, Dude, and Crazy Rich Asians—had come out within a span of five months. Then in October she hosted SNL, during which she discussed how she had waited outside in an attempt to see Lucy Liu host the show back in the winter of 2000. She didn’t make it in, but it was meaningful nonetheless. When Yang and staff writer Anna Drezen were writing Awkwafina’s monologue, they threw around the idea of having Liu in the audience as a bit. “It ended up being pared down to something nice, sweet, and heartwarming, which at that point you didn’t really see Nora do,” says Yang. “She just thought it was important that if it was going to be her onstage alone that she might as well write a little, quick love note to this woman that she looked up to.”

On the inside, Lum felt the churn of anxiety. The rush of attention—and microscopic scrutiny—unsettled her. She didn’t feel present; she wasn’t sure she belonged in that world. “That summer, it was a lot of people being like, ‘Just enjoy, dude, just have fun, live in the moment,’ ” she says. “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. Why do I feel like no one knows me anymore?

“Maybe it does go back to depression,” Lum continues. “It comes in different forms your whole life. I was scared about what this meant: ‘Was this the pinnacle of all those years of waiting? And why do I feel like I don’t want it? I don’t want this to be the summer that that’s it.’ ” That’s the Nora Lum that she still doesn’t know how to introduce to the world, the person she doesn’t quite believe can be a movie star. “Fame is not a cure for depression,” she says. “It’s just not. It’s not necessarily the cause of it, but it’s also not the cure of it.”

The last time we speak, she’s quarantining in Vancouver getting ready to shoot Swan Song. The production has put her in an apartment of modernist grays save for a large still life of lemons above the dining room table. For Thanksgiving, her manager sent her a dinner service from a restaurant at the airport. Work itself is the thing that grounds her, gives shape to her day and a sense of self. “I will break my back for this work,” says Lum. “This is the work that I love and I don’t mind extending myself for.”

Still, the questions linger; the gap between her childhood and the celebrity of her life grows perhaps wider. “When I finally started to feel some semblance of success and satisfaction, I started to remember all of the things that I forgot, because when you’re happy with your life you don’t hold on to the bad things that happened to you. Instead you thank them for existing, because without them you wouldn’t be here. Right? So I look back on those times and I remember what it was to feel like that. Now that I got it, have I really changed? Have I really evolved from that kid who didn’t know why she was sad at different times?

“It’s so beautiful for me as someone who always wanted to achieve and never really could,” Lum adds. “I mean, I can make my grandma proud just by farting on time in a good fart joke.”

This article originally appeared in the February 2021 issue of Harper's BAZAAR, available on newsstands February 2.

GET THE LATEST ISSUE OF BAZAAR

You Might Also Like

• A Cleaning Expert Explains the Best Way to Clean Cloth Face Masks After You Wear Them — Good Housekeeping

• 35 Delicious Pantry Recipes That Use What's Already in Your Cabinets and Freezer — Good Housekeeping

• The Amish keep to themselves. And they’re hiding a horrifying secret. — Cosmopolitan