In the latest in our Finances after Fifty series we talk to Miria Aman, 53, a massage therapist, business owner and mother of two teens, whose life has been a wild ride through 'the good, the bad and the ugly'.
I grew up in a little place called Bukittinggi in Indonesia. It was just me and my mum. I never knew my dad. My mum was really brainy. She wasn't allowed to be a doctor because she was a woman so she did the second best thing and became a pharmacist. She hated the fact that a lot of people couldn't get medicine because they didn't have the money so she would just give it away and she got into trouble.
But she was like the Artful Dodger. She could make money from anything. There were only two hotels in town and they were really basic, so she formed a guesthouse. She was great at cooking and she cut deals with bus drivers and restaurants. She ended up being in the Lonely Planet. It put Bukittinggi on the map.
When I was nine, she left me to run the guesthouse while she disappeared to Bali for three months. She’d hurt her leg because she was motorbiking on the sand dunes and crashed. Then she came back and she’d met this guy Jonathon. She said, "we’re going to England".
London was a shock to the system. It was freezing and the food was crap. It was the first time I understood what racism was. People thought if you can't speak English, you must be stupid. I got into fights because I wasn't your typical Asian person that stays quiet and doesn't make eye contact. I thought, What did I do to make you so angry? I had a black girlfriend, Alex. She pulled me aside and said, “Don't you get it? It's because of your colour".
I was always going to detention. But I had a teacher, Mr Lloyd, who really got me. He said, “What makes you happy?” He discovered I liked drawing and painting so he gave me A4 paper and said, “Just draw". I drew the things that I missed: the beach, the volcano, the coconut trees. He was so impressed, he put up all the pictures in the hall as people came in. When people came to school on Monday, they saw all these pictures of my childhood and my life, and they just saw me. And that was when I started making friends.
Mum heard that her sister was going to take over the guesthouse so we went home to make sure that didn't happen. When we came back to London, Jonathan was gone. So we were stuck. Life took a dive. We ended up homeless at Victoria station in the freezing cold. I met this lovely guy who was about 15 who’d run away from home. He said, “I’m going to make you warmed up and full.” We got a cup of tea and he said, “The trick is to put in as much sugar as possible.” I put in, like, five cubes and he was right. It was delicious.
Mum met a man named George and we lived with him for a number of years. He was an alcoholic and in the end he was quite violent so we had to get an injunction. Mum and I moved into a council house in the East End. It was just life: the good, bad and the ugly.
I studied at Exeter University then I got a part-time job at Spitalfields Market. There was this guy with an Indonesian food stall but he wasn't selling anything because he was a six foot white guy. He needed my face to sell it. Then he found out I could cook. This grumpy guy always came in for my satay. He goes, “What is it that you do?” I said, “I've just finished a degree in public relations". He hooked me up with a TV producer who was in between PAs, this amazing woman called Sandra Hastie, who had a Bafta award for a children’s programme called Press Gang.
She would turn up at 10 o’clock and I would come at six, because I had to action everything before she arrived. You know The Devil Wears Prada? It was literally like that. There were all these famous people and I had to pretend to be cool. I had to make sure the young actors were in makeup on time and learned their lines. My nickname was “the kid”. If anyone needed anything it was, “just talk to the kid”.
I became a third AD (assistant director). Seeing your name in the credits was freaking awesome. Now I watch everything to the bitter end just to respect the people who worked on it. But after three years in TV I thought, I'm going to have a heart attack. What didn’t sit well with me was how cut-throat it was.
I started my first company, Stress Angels. I did on-site massage because nobody did it at that time. I convinced this company to invest in me and within a year I paid the money back. I would drag that on-site chair up and down the Underground, turn up to offices, do home visits.
I have a feeling for things. My mum always knew it. She would say to anybody who was sick, “Miria can fix you". But when I lived in the Western world, I felt like I needed proof. So I studied Swedish massage, sports massage, trigger point therapy, Alexander technique, kinesiology, just to convince others that I belong here.
I met my (now) ex-husband and we moved to Australia. I set up a room in our apartment and quite quickly I got really busy. People say, what kind of massage do you do? I think that’s a funny question. I just work from where you're at and what you need on that day. I’ve helped people with neuropathy, pregnancy, cancer, gut issues. If it's to do with the body, I will help you ease the symptoms.
My ex-husband was a New Zealander so we came here to start a family. I didn't have anyone by then because my mum passed away in 2003. Now we have two beautiful teenagers, 17 and 19, and I'm the crazy mother who can’t speak English and talks to anybody.
The white picket fence – being normal – I thought I needed that. But it never suited me because I have a passion in me. I can't live a normal life. I’ve faced so much and my life could have been over at any point. So I thought, if I'm still alive, heck man, let's live.
No one taught to me about finance. I learned about it later on in life. A friend made me listen to a podcast called The Happy Saver with Ruth Henderson, and it was amazing because it was just about ordinary people and how they changed their lives.
I'm renting right now. I had money from selling the house after my divorce but I didn't have enough to buy a house. I work for myself so the bank wouldn't give me a loan. For two years I tried to earn enough money so they could give me a mortgage. Then I looked at it and said, 'it's not for me'. I put my money into long-term investment and I’ve forced myself to put money into KiwiSaver.
Losing clients through death isn’t pleasant and it’s made me think of my own mortality. So before I go out, I want to help as many people as I can.
* This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. As told to Julie Hill.
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