Susan Ma: from poverty in Shanghai to Lord Sugar's boardroom

Susan Ma was an unusual candidate for The Apprentice.

Her uncanny knack of knowing the right thing to do wasn't accompanied by the comic bluster of some of the show's previous notable candidates, such as Ruth Badger or Stuart Baggs "The Brand".

Susie, as her team-mates called her, was the opposite. So frequently did her good ideas go unheeded that she came across as something of a boardroom Cassandra, cursed never to be believed.

Ma fell at The Apprentice's final hurdle when she was fired by Lord Sugar in the final show. "I think we're going to hear about her," added Sugar after the youngest candidate - she's 21 - left the room. She finished behind the eventual winner Tom Pellereau because the experts drafted in by Sugar judged her business plan to be ludicrously ambitious. She was naive, they said, and hopelessly optimistic about her cosmetics business that was, in Lord Sugar's words, still a "back of the kitchen" operation.

More troubling was the unkind treatment she suffered at the hands of her fellow contestants.

"Deliberate undermining, deriding and excluding" was the verdict of one wellbeing expert after an episode where fellow contestant Zoe mocked Ma's suggestion of paying a school to take away their rubbish for resale, before realising that Ma had the right idea.

It takes a few minutes of her characteristic caution before she admits that the jibes and scapegoating were "hurtful". "There were times when I was surprised by the way people were speaking to me and by what they were saying," she says. "At certain points people felt that I was an easy target and perhaps easier to get rid of."

Tensions are inevitable in the pressure cooker environment the show creates, "and it brings out the worst side in you," says Ma. "I don't think the other candidates would behave like that normally. I'm friends with them all now and they are absolutely lovely to me." Is she friends with Zoe, who she branded "one of the bitchiest and most backstabbing people I've ever met" on the show? "I speak to Zoe," she replies, hesitantly.

If the Facebook groups dedicated to Ma are anything to go by, it was her propensity to pose bizarre questions that defined her in the public eye. The group "Are the French very fond of their children?", which admittedly only has 10 members, was set up in tribute to one such remark, blurted out as Ma pondered the merits of selling a child car seat to Parisians. Is there a disconnect between her intelligence and the moments of ditziness? "I definitely see where you're coming from, and I'm working on that," she says.

The source of her toughness, however, is easier to locate. She grew up in relative poverty in Shanghai, without electricity or heating. An only child as a result of China's one-child policy, her mother Shu Mei Lu bathed her in a bucket in their small flat. "We didn't have the gadgets we have now, but it was happy," she says. "I had a great family and lots of love. I had everything I wanted. I suppose when you don't know what you could be having, you're happy with what you've got." It's an intriguing insight, especially considering her later admission that she wants to "have it all", so she can say "Mum, you want a big house? I'll buy you a mansion".

The seven-year-old Ma's robustness was tested in a different way when they moved to Cairns in Australia, where her father had gone when she was one to earn money for the family. "When I first arrived I was enrolled at a state school, and I didn't speak any English. But one thing I was very good at was maths, because you don't need to know the language for that. I used to get 100 per cent in all the tests and the other kids got really angry with me."

The experience drove her to learn the language within two months from a set of English books her father had bought her. "After that the bullying scaled back."