Freedom.
That’s all I want.
Freedom from the patriarchy that is my parents’ culture.
Freedom from having to live in this home
Where the men don’t have to cook or clean.
Freedom from being told that my husband won’t love me.
Why won’t he love me you ask?
He won’t love me because I refuse to be like my mother.
I will not heed to a man’s every beck and call.
I will not cook and clean while my husband sits idly and does nothing.
My whole life my sisters and I were told to cook and clean.
If you don’t, your husband will leave you. 
It doesn’t matter if you are busy and don’t see what happens.
“It’s your fault,” my mother says to me.
Why? is my only question. I wasn’t even there.
Because you are the girl and you should be the responsible one, she says.
It won’t matter that my brothers were there.
Even if they’re 30 and I am only 12.
What is equality in my culture?
There is none.
I want to be free from all of this.
This lifestyle where even if I am beaten half to death by my future husband,
I am told to ua siab ntev.
To bear with it.
To change something about myself so that I would no longer anger him.
Because being beaten black and blue is somehow my fault.
Because somehow, the men are never wrong.
Of course, they go along with it.
After all, they were raised that way.
They become spoiled and entitled just like our fathers were.
It hurts to be a part of this culture.
Nobody who does not know the truth will understand.
“Why don’t you want a Hmong wedding?” says my sister in law.
She is white. She never had to go through what we went through.
She won’t understand and I understand that.
“It’s hard to explain,” I tell her. “You won’t understand.”
She would have loved a Hmong wedding, is what she tells me.
I know my parents will try to force me to have one.
The same way they forced my sister into her’s.
She fought back every step of the way
But it was too late.
Neither she nor my brother in law wanted one.
Why wouldn’t we want one?
After all, it’s our culture, isn’t it?
It’s our culture for the groom to pay the bride’s family to marry her.
It’s our culture where the women are sold like livestock to other families.
My mother said, “We raised you and fed you. Their family should pay us for raising you so that you could be a part of their family.”
She says it as if we are pigs for slaughter.
She and my father will be happy if they receive their money.
I will not be treated like an object.
I am not to be sold like some farm animal.
My sisters and I are stronger than my brothers.
We have gone through so much and continue to endure it silently.
My sisters have fought their way to the successful women they are now.
My brothers are not quite as successful.
They sit in my house, day after day.
Failing marriages and unemployment surround them.
After all, how can someone who’s been handed everything, learn to take care of them self?
They haven’t gone through what we have and have never had to endure what we do.
My sisters and I are strong.
We have endured.
We will survive.
They have been freed.
And soon, I will be free.