Awkwafina

It's definitely a privilege to be able to do what you love to do; it's not something that everyone gets to do, so I feel really good about that.

Let's take Taylor Swift. She lives in a huge beautiful apartment; she gets limo-ed everywhere. She's not seeing what it means to live in New York.

I have lived in this city my whole life and have seen the way gentrification has changed it. I'm not necessarily against transplants, as 75 percent of my good friends, roommate, and boyfriend are not native New Yorkers.

My mom passed away when I was 4 years old, and she came from a very conservative Korean background. I feel like my life would've been incredibly different had she still been alive.

I'm torn between wanting to connect with what I grew up with and what's available, living in Brooklyn. I don't have a grimy supermarket that decapitates frogs' heads nearby.

Rap was started by black people and, thus, is at the foundation of black culture. So people cannot always wrap their minds around someone like me being inspired by it. But if you listen to the things we're saying, they're authentically us.

My grandma was very traditional, but she herself is a rebel of that culture.

Other female rappers are overly sexual, have no wit, and their lyrics are so generic. I want to change the game to make rap that shows I'm not a normal female rapper - it's not about how rich I am, how much sex I have, or how many boyfriends I have. That's just not me.

I can't tell if I want to be a rapper who's funny because I kind of enjoy just doing really stupid songs about nothing. But I want to have a career that's long-lasting, and I don't think people want to listen to a straight-up comedy rapper all the time.

I remember watching Margaret Cho with my grandmother on TV. She was my hero, not only because she was funny, but because she showed me that it's okay to be yourself, that it's okay to be a brash yellow girl and to be a strong and brave woman.

I think that's why I was able to do well in the beginning: because it was such a foreign thing. People frame it in a negative way, like, 'For Asian-Americans there's no one out there, so that must be really bad for you.' No, I benefited from it.

I grew up thinking Margaret Cho and Lucy Liu were my idols because that's it.