Lum was born in Stony Brook, New York, on Long Island, to a Chinese American father, Wally, and a Korean American mother, Tia, a painter. She grew up in Forest Hills, Queens. Her mother died from pulmonary hypertension when Lum was 4, and she was raised by her father and paternal grandparents, becoming especially close to her paternal grandmother. One of her paternal great-grandfathers was a Chinese immigrant in the 1940s who opened the Cantonese restaurant Lum's in Flushing, Queens,one of the neighborhood's first Chinese restaurants.Lum attended LaGuardia High School, where she played the trumpet and was trained in classical music and jazz. At age 16, she adopted the stage name Awkwafina, "definitely a person I repressed" and an alter ego to her "quiet and more passive" personality during her college years. Lum majored in journalism and women's studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. From 2006 to 2008, Lum attended Beijing Language and Culture University in China, where she studied Mandarin.
Lum states that Charles Bukowski, Anaïs Nin, Joan Didion, Tom Waits, and Chet Baker were early influences.Prior to her career in entertainment, she was an intern at local New York publications Gotham Gazette and the Times Union newspaper in Albany, and was a publicity assistant for the publishing house Rodale Books.She worked at a vegan bodega after getting fired from a publishing house for releasing the "My Vag" music video.
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