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Awkwafina is here to steal scenes and change the way you see Asian American women

The rapper has always wanted a movie like ‘Crazy Rich Asians’

By
August 15, 2018 at 3:31 p.m. EDT

Adapted from a story by Jessica M. Goldstein for The Washington Post.

In 2012, Nora Lum released a song under the name Awkwafina. Titled “My Vag,” the song’s accompanying music video was sharp — and hilarious. It was a direct response to a Mickey Avalon song with an unprintable (but very predictable) title and an indirect response to the type of men who would write such a song.

Awkwafina’s video went viral.

Then Nora Lum got fired.

Although she admits she was “a s---ty publicist,” getting canned still didn’t feel good. “I felt disgrace from being fired from that,” she said. “It was at a time when my dad, no one, really believed that Awkwafina would be a thing.”

But things have changed for the rapper-actress-comedian. In 2018, Awkwafina, now 30, released a critically acclaimed hip-hop EP, “In Fina We Trust,” and is charming the masses in two of the summer’s biggest movies: As a scammer-slash-pickpocket in “Ocean’s 8,” and in “Crazy Rich Asians,” in which she’s the primary scene stealer as Peik Lin, the uber-wealthy, ­borderline-manic best friend to the romantic heroine. Awkwafina carries herself as though nobody told her that she’s not the star of the movie.

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“Crazy Rich Asians” director Jon M. Chu has admitted that when he cast Awkwafina, he “had no idea whether it was going to work. I was like, ‘This will either ruin the movie or take the movie to another level.’ But she knew exactly what she was doing.”

“I think it’s so exciting when you get to watch a star right before they explode. And this is what we’re seeing” with Awkwafina, said Elaine Lui, a celebrity expert and founder/editor of LaineyGossip.com.

Awkwafina was 5 when “The Joy Luck Club” hit theaters in 1993. In the quarter-century since, of the very few major Hollywood studio movies featuring majority-Asian casts, all were set in the past. “Crazy Rich Asians” is the first to treat its characters not as historical subjects but as actual people living in the present day.

“I think I definitely clocked that this had never happened, and I never thought it would ever happen in my career,” she said.

Surely this was not the inner monologue of, say, Tom Hardy, gazing across the set of “Dunkirk”: “I never thought I’d get to be in a movie with so many white men, written by a white man, and directed by a white man.”

It can be tempting, in a stretch that’s seen the box office triumphs of “Black Panther,” “Coco,” “Get Out,” “Girls Trip” and “Wonder Woman” (not to mention “Ocean’s 8”), to feel as though inclusion is the new normal. But Hollywood is no more diverse now than it was a decade ago, on screen or off. The new normal looks an awful lot like the old normal. It does not look very much like “Crazy Rich Asians.” Not yet, at least.

Based on Kevin Kwan’s best-selling novel of the same name, the film is a luscious, glittery, love story. Its joyfulness was tear-inducing for Awkwafina and Liu.

“Ironically, it makes you emotional because these are happy, joyful people,” said Lui, who has seen people cry at screenings. “They’re living big lives. ... Being Asian, that, too, is not something we see in an English-language film, to see us represented in that way. [To see us] not recovering from a war, [or feeling] sadness because of whatever you discovered in your ancestry. Those are valid stories, too. But these are just modern Asians who are out there living their best life.”

When Awkwafina was watching her dailies on set with Chu, she also cried. “I think it was in that moment that I realized what we were doing there,” she said. “When you’re filming a movie, you don’t understand the impact yet. But it was an impactful moment for me. ”

Awkwafina was born to a Chinese American father and a South Korean immigrant mother who died when she was 4. She says it was her grandmother who really nurtured her to be funny and outgoing.

“I never cared about anything,” Awkwafina said. “I would do anything for a laugh. I would jump off a building for a laugh.” She also had “a love affair” with hip-hop.

“When I was growing up, I was really looking for movies like ‘Crazy Rich Asians,’” said Awkwafina. She’d watch her childhood favorite movie, “Air Bud” (yes, the basketball-playing dog, what of it?) and think, wouldn’t that be so cool, if I was that kid? But she thought “it wouldn’t make any sense if I was that kid, because I wasn’t white,” she said.

At LaGuardia High School, the performing arts academy (other notable alumni: Timothée Chalamet, Nicki Minaj, “Ocean’s 8” castmate Sarah Paulson), she played the trumpet. She developed her alter-ego when she was about 15: a hyper-expressive public self who performs in a way Nora Lum never would.

She didn’t see the “Asian dad part come out” until she started embracing Awkwafina.

She set out to prove him wrong. She made “Tawk," a scrappy Web series in which she conducted interviews in bodegas, laundromats and subway cars. In 2014, she released her debut album, “Yellow Ranger.” She landed a spot on MTV’s humorous advice show “Girl Code” and parts in “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” and the Netflix stoner comedy “Dude.” She even collaborated with her “guiding light,” Margaret Cho, on the song “Green Tea.”

“Crazy Rich Asians” isn’t just a win for representation; it upends limiting, persistent stereotypes about who Asians are and can be. “The cast has talked about this all the time: When they’re in movies, they’re doctors with clipboards, they’re accountants,” Lui said. Here’s an Asian-American rapper who is a movie star, who swears, who talks about her vagina. That breaks the mold of so many expectations of what Asian women should be.”

Awkwafina already has new projects lined up: hosting the iHeartRadio MMVAs on Aug. 26, shooting sci-fi thriller “Paradise Hills,” voicing a character in “The Angry Birds Movie 2.” And she’s “feeling optimistic” about the direction of the industry.

“We [want] a Hollywood that represents the realities of the people that live in this country,” she said. “This movie, every movie that strays against the very old-timey narrative is a giant middle finger to any kind of ideas that we are not American, that we are all one color, and all those things.”