I’m embarrassed I didn’t bring anything. It’s 10-something in the morning, and I’m meeting Nora Lum, 38 – best known as rapper, comic actor and writer Awkwafina – the morning after the Bafta TV awards. I feel that I should have brought her a pastry pick-me-up. Yet here I am empty-handed. “It could have been Chinese buns,” she playfully suggests.
Yes, it could have been. Especially because we are meeting to discuss her new series on Apple TV, Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook. It sees the star of box-office hits Crazy Rich Asians and Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings travel across the US to learn from a new generation of Asian American chefs, in the hope that she might revive her own family’s long-closed Cantonese restaurant. But there’s one problem: she can’t cook.
Or so she says. “Unlikely” cook? There’s nothing unlikely about it, I wager. Sure, in the first episode, Lum looks genuinely alarmed by the triple threat of hot oil, high heat and sharp knives in wok cooking. But she does very well. She clearly has a knack for food.
“Well, I think it was the easiest knack to develop, because all it really takes is to eat at a ton of restaurants and order food constantly,” she pushes back.
“But look, I was raised by immigrant Chinese people – I did eat all the weird Chinese stuff,” she says, understating her family’s impressive culinary credentials. The full story is thus: back in the 50s, Lum’s great-grandfather Jimmy opened one of New York’s first Chinese-American restaurants in Flushing, Queens. Called Lum’s, it became something of an institution, helping to popularise the Chinese-American food beloved today (think: orange chicken and BBQ ribs).
“The restaurant is how we came to this country,” she explains. “It closed in 1982, so I wasn’t born. But it was so important. The way they talk about it is like a family member that passed away.”
Lum’s new TV show about it is pleasingly warm and personal, with much of its gentle humour coming less from the supposedly awkward personality that inspired Lum’s stage name than her deep appreciation for food and hospitality. Have you ever seen someone scream “Oh my God, not the cilantro!” in ecstatic anticipation of a herb? I have, and it’s charming. But ultimately, Unlikely Cook is a love letter to Lum’s magnetic, occasionally foul-mouthed, paternal grandmother; the woman who raised her when she lost her mother at just four years old.
Several months after I meet Lum, I see the Instagram post announcing her grandmother’s death. But, for now, I ask about the woman who has loomed so large over her creative work, and regularly steals the show in Unlikely Cook. How easy is it working with your own grandma?
“It’s crazy. I’ve been asking my grandma to be in things since my first [TV] job, which was on MTV’s Girl Code,” Lum explains. Grandma obliged, starring in the brilliantly named episode Bad Sex, Grandparents, Eating Habits.
“I’m always a little worried, thinking: ‘Oh my God, what are you going to say?’ But she has such a lovely on-camera affect. It just kind of clicks.”
“With this [project], she’s calling me at all hours of the night, we’re staying up talking. Actually, she called me a week ago and was like, ‘I’m just thinking about the menu, and we should put a pu pu platter – but we shouldn’t call it pu pu, because, you know, it means shit so we should call it the volcano platter.’ It’s giving her excitement again.”
Between the family appearances and actor Jimmy O Yang’s star turn (Lum’s real-life best friend) Unlikely Cook may be Lum’s most biographical work yet. Which is saying something given her hit 2020 comedy television show was literally called Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens, and starred her as directionless, awkward Nora living in – you guessed it – Flushing, with her widowed father and boisterous grandmother.
For fans of Nora from Queens, there may be a particular, parasocial joy in watching Unlikely Cook. The sitcom could be absurd (Nora’s grandma accidentally growing cannabis, for instance), but you always sensed some emotional truth beneath it. Now we get the real Nora Lum.
“Oh my God, yeah,” she exclaims. She refers to an episode where she is stressed. “That episode was bizarre to watch. Because I have never seen myself be serious, be panicked. That’s never been recorded.”
“There was something about it where I actually felt bad. I felt bad for my exes, my friends. I was watching myself back like, ‘Chill out, girl!’”
I didn’t have her pegged as the self-conscious type, I say, what with working so frequently from her real life. “I’ve never been documentarised in quite this way,” she explains. “There’s a part of me that’s like, oh my God, you let people see this crazy, unbridled version of you?! I still don’t know how to deal with that. But I do feel that whatever is honest, it can’t be the worst.”
To be fair, food is emotional stuff, and so often bound up in questions of identity, history and, especially in the immigrant context, family sacrifice. I ask Lum about her observation in the documentary that a generation of elders grafted in restaurants so their kids didn’t have to. They could be lawyers instead.
“The truth is that a lot of the [older] people we met didn’t want their children to go back into the restaurant business. For my great-grandpa’s generation, when they came over they were relegated to either laundromats or restaurants, cooking food that has historically been demonised,” Lum says. “But then again, it’s also something that people love. There are more Chinese restaurants in America than there are McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King, all of that.”
But while the restaurant business gave Lum’s family life, it also took a lot of it. Her grandmother had her own restaurant for a time, but when it failed, Lum’s grandparents were forced to file for bankruptcy, losing both their business and home. For a while, the whole family lived in a one-bedroom apartment.
“I think her business failing was really hard on her. She would fold the napkins in the back. She would launder napkins in our home. And she would be the most amazing maître d’ that the whole town knew. I don’t think she ever really recovered from it.”
Would opening a permanent Lum’s be a way of rewriting that history?
“I think giving back – if I’m in a position to do that – does feel like this full-circle moment where I could still make my family proud in that way. It would definitely be something for her.”
All this talk of making family proud and honouring their sacrifices is something I know well, having also been raised in an immigrant household. Did Lum agonise over her choice of a creative career as much as I did when I chose English lit over law – something I loved over something that might more reliably make good on what my family gave me?
“No, because I don’t think I was smart enough to get into law school,” she laughs.
“Oh, I doubt that’s true,” I reply.
“I’m actually not a good student. I went to summer school for gym. For gym. If you fail a class during the year, you can make it up over the summer. But it’s like a punishment, right? Every day I was taking two periods of gym, because I had failed so many times.”
She continues: “Do you know what Earth science is? The rock one? It’s the easy rock one. It’s not even chemistry. I had to take the Earth science [exam] five times, dude.
“So I think my family were just thinking, well, she has nothing to lose. Besides I wasn’t doing it off their dime, so I think maybe they were just happy I was doing something. But my dad really wanted me to be a meat inspector. I’m still on those government job registries that he signed me up for. He’s like, “Meat inspector, that’s a really good job.”
“It is a good job,” I concur.
“It is! Great entry level salary. And you always, always need a meat inspector,” she says.
“You could start now,” I offer.
“I know, I know,” she laughs, and I wonder if she has the same idea I have. Awkwafina is the Meat Inspector, coming soon to Apple TV.
OK, back to business. Watching Unlikely Cook, I couldn’t help thinking about the politics of America right now. After all, a show celebrating the work of immigrants feels significant in the age of Trump and ICE. Was that intentional?
“No, not at all. But if you want to tell the story of Chinese-American food, immigrant culture is something you can’t ignore. It’s also a deep part of our identity as second-generation Asian Americans, it’s part of how we see the world. And it’s a hard thing to see right now in America.”
Our time is nearly up. But wait, I’m still not sure, does this mean someday there will be a permanent Lum’s? “It’s still in the works of being figured out,” she says.
But clearly, in Nora Lum herself, something has stuck. “After this show, I did start dabbling a little,” she says. While shooting a film in Kentucky, she took to cooking her own breakfast, “a four-egg omelette with spinach and cheese”, she says with faint pride. It’s not quite as impressive as Chinese buns. But maybe they’ll come soon.
Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook is on Apple TV from Friday.
