Awkwafina was "saved" by her grandmother after the death of her mom.
The ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ star credits her nan for helping her cope after her mother passed away when she was just four-years-old.
She said: "I remember seeing my grandma as someone who was saving me. She was my best friend at a young age. She’s snarky; she enjoys a good joke. Nothing was ever too dirty for her. She was really strong too. Whenever people talked about Asian women being these docile, subservient creatures, my grandma just blew all that out of the water."
Following her mother’s death from pulmonary hypertension, Awkwafina turned to comedy and making people laugh to help her cope with becoming the family’s "fixture of sorrow".
She added: "Family members would come up to me and cry, and I didn’t like that. So I tried to do this sideshow of, ‘Hey, let me make you laugh.’ I needed people to feel joy. That’s who all this began. I was the class clown all the way."
And the ‘Come Stop Me’ hitmaker thinks she would have followed exactly the same path, even if her mom had been around.
She told People magazine: "I think all the time, what would I have been doing if my mom hadn’t passed? I don’t think I’d be here, because I think that I had to face a certain level of trauma to be so joyously self-deprecating and so free. All I did was worry [when I was younger]. Now I just want Awkwafina to represent the positive impact of what I went through."
Awkwafina ‘saved’ by grandmother
