“I missed the Oscars!”Įach time I met with her - the first two times in Los Angeles and once in New York - she’d insisted that there was nothing glamorous about her life, even after shooting two of this summer’s most anticipated movies: June’s Ocean’s 8 and August’s Crazy Rich Asians. It was only after she’d gone on Twitter that it dawned on her: “FUCK! I missed them,” she recalled, stretching her face into a grimace.

Instead, she’d spent the evening playing Guitar Hero and watching Girls Incarcerated, a Netflix docuseries about teen inmates at a juvenile detention center. It’d been nearly a week since the Oscars, which Awkwafina forgot to watch on television because she’d thought the awards show wasn’t for another week.

The culprit of the musty stench: a stack of bus tubs behind us.Īs steaming plates of pork over rice, oyster omelette, stinky tofu, sautéed spinach, and three-cup chicken appear at the table, she updates me on her life. But the manager, a family friend who only learned that she was one of Ocean’s 8 when she showed up at the restaurant with a studio publicist, then moved the actor to the lower level of the restaurant, away from all the other patrons. On that brisk Saturday morning, the now-29-year-old Awkwafina, born Nora Lum, had looked right at home, plopped behind a table surrounded by customers dining and gabbing in Mandarin. There’s a slight odor drifting about the banquet room of the cozy Taiwanese restaurant in Queens that the rapper turned actor has frequented since she was 13. “I smell a funk,” says Awkwafina, sniffing the air like a wine connoisseur, her brows furrowed.

My vag awkwafina