Michele & Masca | On finding (and shining) their light

April 15, 2024

For our latest Superwomen series we interviewed not one, but two Superwomen, both of whom are not only outstanding individuals, but incredible teammates as well. As both life partners and business partners, they have had to navigate how to find balance in almost every aspect of life, learning to work with one another, and also learning how to manage and find time for individual pursuits.

Michele Aboro is an Undefeated World Championship boxer, breast cancer survivor, sound tech, entrepreneur and mum. Masca is a breathwork instructor, photographer, healer, and also an entrepreneur and mum. They have been together for 14 years and are the parents to their daughter Blue. Michele is the daughter of an interracial couple – her mother was outcast from her family as a result. Masca was raised in a Cantonese-Dutch household.

Gay, mixed race, women in sport, survivors, businesswomen, mental health advocates, Waiguoren, … if you had to choose a label for each of them, and them as a couple, there are plenty that they have been given. In this interview however, we are giving them a platform to share their message(s) and how they’ve navigated unique obstacles to be seen as Superwomen of Shanghai.

Q: Let’s start with your background story – I don’t think it’s something that a lot of people know. How did you first meet?

Michele: We’ve known each other for a long time, Masca was dating my downstairs neighbor. At the time I was still in Germany and would come back after the [boxing] competitions to Holland. After I stopped competing, I went into sound engineering. At that time, Masca was here in China. I’d just finished a tour – we would tour for 3-6 months and then take a break. So I had about a month off and came to visit Masca. This was in 2009.

I thought it was Singapore… but it was Shanghai. I had never been. I expected to see Kungfu… but instead I got the Maglev and I was just blown away! I didn’t expect the kind of… the infrastructure and the skyscrapers. It was amazing. You couldn’t even think of some of this in the West.

But then the living standard and the difference of development, socially, was really different. For me coming from Europe I was just trying to understand this two-toned layer of culture. I just couldn’t understand it all – it was crazy.

Masca: I lived in an apartment without windows. I think she was most shocked by that.

Michele: Haha yeah! I was! When we first came to live in China, we had just enough money to eat our beef noodle soup. As we needed to manage the funds we came here with, we can’t eat beef noodle anymore.

Q: So from meeting each other in Holland to entering a relationship together and then opening up a gym in a foreign country. That’s a lot! After years of working together, do you have any advice for partners who are also in business together?

Michele: When it’s all one, work, home.. everything becomes a blur. You need to make your own time because you don’t have it. When you work and live with [your partner], you look to make your own time apart, but then, you also need to make time to be together.

So we’ve started walking around Shanghai and we talk.

Masca: We’ve started to do that because it’s important [to create space]. It’s been an eye opener to reserve that space and time for us, without distraction.

Q: Is there anything that you wish you had done differently?

Michele: When you start to turn your profession into a business you do things that you wouldn’t normally do, when it’s your profession or passion. I have to water down the way I would coach somebody so that anyone can do it. The majority of people who walk into [Aboro] then where just getting to know their bodies. It’s far from a place where high level athletes are, but it does mean that people want to and can learn to box.

It’s a different kind of expectation. When I first walked into this, it was not my expectation or what I wanted to do. But we had to [change to] adapt to the situation. The majority of people who walked through our doors were commercial clients. To make something that you are proud of, you have to adapt. I was only used to high level coaches… so I was trying to learn how to coach in motion. There was no online coach teaching you how to become a boxing coach.. I needed to create that. To bring all my knowledge down to a level that was digestible for others. I was making constant mistakes.

Masca: From a personal point of view, I think I made a mistake to not pursue our relationship in a better way. Everything was around the business, but not everything was around myself, or the relationship, I was working and saw how happy it was making others, and I was just becoming more and more unhappy. I had this resentment, I hated it… the thing that kept me going was that I saw it was working for others. There was just so much stress, especially when you first get to China and need to make it happen. The coaches that were here 10 years ago – I was a horrible boss to them – but now, I’ve learned. We see how we can crack the code here together. We work together to see what we can fix.

Q: Meditation is a practice that both of you do. How did you discover that this was the tool that was going to work for you? So much so that now you Masca offer it regularly as a class?

Masca: I started meditation around 16. My mum was always looking for something to heal her. I always knew from when I was little that she was unhappy and always had headaches. My mom went to someone who suggested meditation could help. As a child, I was this rag doll that no one knew what to do with – I was a troubled child. My mom suggested it might also be good for me to follow her and learn these chakras. I always fell asleep every class.

After many experiences like this… through heart ache, learnings, hard-times, depression, etc… I went to this small village in France and read this book, Wisdom for cooling the flames, and went to a retreat to practice mindfulness. From then on it was always something I would practice; it helped me calm down. And now, I am certified in Systemic Constellation and doing a breathing course.

Michele: I always did meditation for better performance. To be in the zone when I’m fighting.

Masca: Everything you’ve done is for sports performance, while everything I was seeking was for life performance.

Michele: I think you could look at this as my life performance. I had nothing else. If [boxing] didn’t work, there wasn’t much else that would work. I didn’t have a choice. I had no great education, I could work in a 7-11 or something like this, or I could make this my future. And luckily I was good at it, so I could elevate myself out of a situation that I could have potentially been stuck in.

A lot of time in the ring, I thought I can’t go backwards. The only way is to go forwards, I have to go through the next person to keep moving forward. In good times you create weak people, in bad times you create strong people.

I think a lot has to do with the mindset of the individual. My mom had six children and she brought us up alone. She was strong-willed and strong-minded, she never swayed. She had 3-4 jobs. She would work from 5am until 7, come home cook for us and go to bed until she was able to run a club and then we didn’t see her because she worked into the early hours of the night. But she was alone, we didn’t have any external family. Her family disowned her because she had black children. She had friends, but it was mainly us and we were very tight as a family growing up because this was all we had.

Q: Michele, the way you found boxing, or boxing found you, speaks to a dream that you have to help children who have similar upbringings as yourself. Can you share more on this vision?

Michele: I want to give children that the world has kind of forgotten, another chance. There are kids who need this all over the world, not just in third world countries. Some kids are not academically driven, but it’s not that these children don’t possess intellect. I would love to work with a government to go into schools where problems have happened with kids and use boxing as a way to diffuse situations. [These kids] feel they are against a wall and emotions play out. Lost children – they fall through the net in regular schools. If they’re not sitting in the front of the class and able to get attention, they sit in the back and the teacher doesn’t even see them and then the teacher starts sending them to detention. I was one of these kids. And the detention classes don’t work. Then they get sent to an annex, which is school for naughty kids. When you put naughty kids together without a diffusion you’re going to have an explosion with a teacher who doesn’t know how to deal with these kids, and these kids rip the teacher to pieces. I think this kind of intervention can help these kids and it’s been shown that boxing can help because it plays into discipline and respect, especially when they have a mentor to show them how to talk about what they feel inside.

I went to an annex myself. It didn’t help me at all. It just gave me more naughty children to hang out with.

One of my friends started doing kickboxing, and he brought his brother and then they brought me. We met this guy called Lincoln Bony in Brixton (a tough part of London), and Lincoln gave these classes. He was a big black guy and most were black boys, I was the only girl there. The one thing he did was teach us about spirituality. You would never imagine you would walk into a room and it’s full of incense and we’re like, “What the **** is going on here.?” We wanted to hit each other!

He said, “This is our first class, and we’re going to sit down around this bowl with incense in it”. I was about 16 and we thought it was crazy. So we sat there just thinking, “Hurry up” because we wanted to train. It felt like a lifetime. Then we could train. Next time we sat there, and we sighed; we just wanted to train. But as time went on, that moment before we went into the training and meditated, it actually gave us a moment to reflect and think. We just sat. As time went on, we understood what reflection meant. You started to actually think before the training what you would do to be better. We learned about discipline and respect because we wouldn’t impose on each others space in that time. It showed us how to dampen down that aggression and too much energy. My first coach was a lifesaver for me. This guy was amazing – we did a kickboxing called Su-tan-do (to perceive, to see and to do). For us, as we got older and molded by him, he became like a male figure to us, like a dad. He put us into a positive role, he put is into higher education later on and got me into sports science. Proximity is key.

Q: Masca, we talked about how meditation impacted you growing up. But you also said you were ‘a troubled child’, how did you find your direction or path, as you also felt like you ‘didn’t really fit in’?

Masca: The way how we grew up, as a migrant family in a very small village – when you look outside everything is white and everything is different except within your home. It was very difficult for me to connect. You have to look deeper and when you’re younger it’s not always easy because you don’t have as many resources.

I had a cousin who was studying architecture who suggested I pursue art because I was drawing a lot. My family works in the food industry and thought: “What are you going to be doing?! Are you going to work in a market and draw peoples portraits?”. But I thought I could try at least. I also took it for granted because it was so effortless. So, my friend signed me up [for an interview]. I was such a lost soul; I would always stop and I didn’t know what to do with my talent; I didn’t know what my talent was. So, she told me “You have to be there at 2pm in Amsterdam, you just have to show something”. So I showed up, I was talking to the director, and the director asked, “Do you know how to use a camera?”. I had no clue. And the course director said if you do a course and you like it, then you can go to the academy. I graduated three years cum laude in fine art photography.

There was an external person in both your lives that helped to support you on your paths. If you see something in someone you need to help them.

Masca: I’m always working with light. With a camera you capture it. But now I want to help other people to shine the light [with meditation and breathwork] instead of capture it.

After 10 years, I’ve realized my calling is to help make people aware of their body. Previously I did photography, and in some ways it’s similar… I see the beauty in some photos that others would see as dirty or old. I’m studying breathwork now. Simple things like focusing on nasal breathing can improve your overall health, but there’s a lot of people who don’t know this. Just by educating people… everyone is so up to date about everything except themselves. They look at other people’s social media, they read articles about this this and that, but how do you really feel? How do you breathe? How do you breathe in the morning and the evening or when you’re anxious or happy?

I want people to be aware of their body to improve their health.

Q: Many see you as ‘Superwomen’. Not just here in Shanghai, but around the world, for all that you have done. What does it mean to you to be a ‘Superwoman’?

Michele: [I think it’s something] that’s left in your own hands. A lot of people outsource [the hard work]; they don’t want to take responsibility. Most of the things I’ve been able to do it’s a point of outing myself, saying “I’m going to do this. Put it out there, out in the world… then you have to do it. ” We’re all the same, we’ve all got the same problems. But, it’s about finding that thing to make you take that leap of faith that could make that change in your life.

Masca: What does put us on the list ‘as superwomen in Shanghai’? In my mind, everyone can be on that list… but maybe to Michele’s point, it’s because we put ourselves out there. Everyone has the body, the mind, but maybe they don’t have the belief. But all we’re really talking about is exercise. We made a decision and that’s where the journey goes, that’s our path. I think a lot of people they don’t know their path. But everyone was born with a path.

Q: Can you elaborate on that more? If you had to share one takeaway from our conversation, what would it be?

Masca: Whenever something is triggering you, that’s a gift. Boxing teaches me that: when you get punched, you want to lean back, but you’ll get hit. If you go forward and slip [the punch] by moving to the side, then it’s a miss and you can continue moving forward. Boxing is all about control; controlling yourself, and anticipating to the person in front of you.

Michele: People always say you are so inspirational, But it’s not inspiration, it’s just getting up and doing it. It’s a point of not being lazy, it’s a point of choices. We all make choices in our life. I didn’t have a choice of getting cancer, but I had a choice of how I managed it.. I tried to create as much of a normal life as possible. It doesn’t make me different from anyone else, but the choices that I made have gotten me to where I am. The action is the ground you stand on.

Everyone says it’s so great that you found your destiny so young. No. Destiny found me, I didn’t have a choice… well, I did, and the choice I made was to move forward.

Super Women

of Shanghai Series

Shanghai is a melting pot of east meets west, modern and old. For the international community, it is a home away from home. In the Super Women of Shanghai (‘SWS’) series, we interview female movers and shakers of the international community, who made herstory in the city.

We hope that the series inspires females to define their herstory and move the dial to break to glass ceiling.