Daughters, by Charlotte Yeung.

The Chinese practice of selling or giving a young female to another family to be raised as a future daughter-in-law is also known as t’ung yang hsi, tong yang xi, tongyangxi, adopted daughter-in-law, daughter-in-law marriage, child daughter-in-law and foster daughter-in-law amongst others.
-Refugee Review Tribunal
raw note of love
laces my grandma’s
throat tight as she
watches her best
friend, a cow, be led away for slaughter, rope hooked around sweating hide.
She is not a friend,
her mother says,
She is dinner.
she wants to throw her
arms around her friend
but she can say nothing.
I’m a daughter after all.
my grandma was sold
by her uncle to be a bride
in a stranger’s home. chapped fingers clutch buckets swollen with
water. she must collect
the eggs and cook and
clean and wash for a
family that has no sons,
only daughters.
they bought their sons– she’s to marry one of them. Daughter, she thinks, as
she visits the ancestral
crypt and only sees the names of men. Daughters are a waste-they leave
the family. Why feed them? Why have them? Daughters-dispensable.
rich men had multiple wives–the more concubines, the more successful. when the government said there
could only be one child,
was it really a surprise
that so
many
girls
were
left
behind?
now there aren’t
enough of them.
they buy brides
from Vietnam, girls tricked to leave on the vague promise of work–cleaning or labor, not marriage.
when she is old enough, they cover her in the red garments of her mother. roots of shock lace her
throat tight as she peers
into the eyes
of her husband.

Charlotte is an IHRAF 2022 Youth Fellow. She is a best-selling Author/2022 Indy Youth Poet Laureate. She is currently a student at Purdue University, IN.