MAKING Golden Globes history, Awkwafina, whose real name is Nora Lum, has won the best actress in a musical or comedy award for her performance in “The Farewell” as Billi, a Chinese-American woman who travels back to China with her family to say goodbye to her terminally ill grandmother (Zhao Shuzhen), who does not know she is sick. It’s the first time a performer of Asian descent has won a lead actress Golden Globe Award for a film. Last year, Sandra Oh became the first Asian woman since 1980 to win best actress in a TV drama for BBC America’s “Killing Eve.” Awkwafina took the stage joking, “This is great, thank you. If I fall upon hard times I can sell this, so that’s good.” She then thanked her family, everyone at A24 and the director Lulu Wang, “You gave me this chance — the chance of a lifetime.” Backstage, Awkwafina commented on the significance of her win. “I just heard that fact and it was pretty mind-blowing,” she began. “There’s also this other feeling that you want there to be more, and I hope this is just the beginning.” She went on to say how “deeply” she connected to the experiences of her character. “I relate to her mentality a lot,” she said. “A lot of children of immigrants in this country do. We are raised to feel like Americans, and when we go back we’re told we don’t belong there. It’s a constant feeling of being lost in translation, and that’s something that definitely resonated with me.” A first-time Globes nominee, Awkwafina won over Ana de Armas (“Knives Out”), Cate Blanchett (“Where’d You Go, Bernadette”), Beanie Feldstein (“Booksmart”) and Emma Thompson (“Late Night”). A blockbuster breakout It’s a good thing for moviegoers that Awkwafina was, in her own words, “the worst” at her chosen art: playing the trumpet. Though she attended New York City’s prestigious LaGuardia High School for performing arts specifically to study the horn, the next Dizzy Gillespie she was not. “My dad went to a parent-teacher conference and my teacher told him, ‘Y’know, for some students, the best thing that ever happens to them is getting into LaGuardia,’” the actress said in a previous interview. Thankfully, for Awkwafina, that turned out not to be true. Instead of ending up in a jazz quartet, she’s hit the big screen in two of 2018’s biggest films: Constance in “Ocean’s Eight,” alongside Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett, and Goh Peik Lin in “Crazy Rich Asians.” So how’d she get from LaGuardia misfit to blockbuster breakout? The fastest route possible: YouTube. Despite her teacher’s bleak assessment of her musical talents, Awkwafina channeled a love of hip-hop into songwriting, unwittingly launching her career with the 2012 release, at the urging of a friend, of her first rap video, “My Vag.” Thanks to lines like “My vag a chrome Range Rover, your vag hatchback ’81 Toyota,” it went viral (2,632,000 views and counting). And while it got Nora Lum fired from her job as a publicity assistant at a publishing company, it made Awkwafina an underground sensation. “That is what I did right, in my whole life,” Awkwafina says of posting the video. “I didn’t expect anything to happen. And to this day, everything that has happened to me — my first movie gig, my first non-music gig — was all from that.” That’s not an oversimplification. When it came time to cast “Crazy Rich Asians,” director Jon M. Chu didn’t need an agent to slide him a Nora Lum headshot. “I’ve watched her for years on YouTube, in her rap videos, and she had a show where she interviewed people in a bodega,” Chu says. “I was always a fan but had nothing to put her in, because she’s just such a unique creature.” Once a friend brought up Awkwafina, “I couldn’t get her out of my head,” Chu says. Despite her bottle-rocket rise to fame, Awkwafina still feels very much connected to the struggling 20-something, who just a few years ago took jobs at a video store and a sushi restaurant to pay rent while working on her music and honing her comedic persona, through her Verizon Go90 variety show “Tawk.” Filmed in New York City delis and subway cars, it featured skits and interviews with comedians, as well as a regular segment starring her sassy grandmother, whom she dubbed “Grandmafina.” She’s something of a workaholic. In addition to filming three movies in 2019, Awkwafina is fine-tuning her sophomore album, the follow-up to 2014’s “Yellow Ranger.” She considers music her first — and longest-running — love. “I’ve been with hip-hop since I was extremely young,” Lum says. “J Dilla, DJ Rashad, I worshipped these people. I had a Mac Book and GarageBand and started producing beats when I was 16 years old. By the time I was 18, I had 500, 600 songs I had produced or sung or rapped on, sitting on a hard drive.” Even now, making beats is her escape, the first place she turns for relaxation when she gets back to her hotel after a long day on set. “People think I’m a parody rapper, like a Weird Al type, but the tragic thing is, I would love to be considered a serious musician,” she says. “Then I did a song called ‘Queef’ and that kind of shattered it. But that’s how it goes.” (SD-Agencies) | 