The rebel daughter

If you grew up in a traditional household, you probably know what it's like to have your life mapped out before you can even talk.

Mine came with a very specific set of cultural rules. My parents are Hmong, born in Laos. They came to Australia as refugees after time in a refugee camp in Thailand. They were young, uneducated and spoke almost no English, and they arrived carrying my oldest brother and very little else. I was born in Melbourne, and my earliest memories are of the Fitzroy commission flats. Money was tight. My parents relied on government support to raise a family that would eventually grow to six children.

When I was around 11, we moved to Brisbane.

As the eldest daughter in a deeply patriarchal culture, I grew up with a double standard. My parents pushed us hard at school. They dreamt of us becoming doctors or lawyers, because those careers meant financial security and family pride (and who wouldn't want free medical or legal advice in the family?). But my real job as a daughter was to learn to cook, clean and become a good daughter-in-law for whichever family I married into.

In our culture, time and money spent on sons was an investment that stayed with the family. Daughters married out. Education for a girl was a nice bonus. Raising a dutiful daughter-in-law was the real measure of success.

I respected how hard my parents fought to give us a better life. But I didn't accept that being a girl set my ceiling. I was observant and grown-up for my age, and watching my parents struggle with money taught me one thing early: I wanted to be financially independent, and I wasn't going to wait for a husband or a cultural script to hand that to me. I just had no idea how I'd get there.

The first time I said no

Education was the only tool I knew, so I threw myself into it and became an A-grade student. But the more independent I became, the more I clashed with my parents' protectiveness.

At 17, my Chinese teacher encouraged me to apply for a scholarship to study in China for a month. I was one of only eight students selected across Australia. It meant flying to Melbourne on my own (my first flight ever), then heading overseas with people I'd never met.

Mum was terrified and tried to stop me. As an adult I understand her fear. She was a mother trying to protect her young daughter. At the time, though, I knew I was ready. So I ignored her and got on the plane.

To this day, Mum calls me a rebel.

Picking my battles

What that label leaves out is that I didn't fight every battle.

By the end of high school I was burnt out, and what I really wanted was a gap year studying in China on a year-long scholarship. I never applied. One month away had nearly given my parents a heart attack, and a whole year was out of the question. So I played the good daughter and went straight to uni.

I chose science as a compromise. I liked it, I was good at it, and it kept the door open to medicine if I ever changed my mind (deep down I knew I wouldn't). Nobody in my family or community had a background in business or finance, and school doesn't teach you how to build wealth. Science felt sensible.

Uni was a struggle, and not because of the content. I went from the top of a supportive, structured high school to a place where nobody pushed you, and I had no passion for where the degree was heading. I did what I needed to pass and not much more.

The long game

What I was doing quietly, though, was planning my way out of home.

I got my driver's licence as soon as I could. I started working as soon as I was legally allowed and saved almost every dollar. By my Honours year I had bought my own car and had enough savings to know I could support myself. Then I moved out.

In my culture, a single daughter leaving home before marriage was close to unheard of. Traditionally, the only accepted way out of your parents' house was through your husband's front door. My parents did everything they could to stop me. Even after I'd gone, every visit came with an offer of money, because they assumed I couldn't survive on my own. I turned it down every time. I wanted to prove that a first-generation daughter of refugee parents could stand on her own two feet.

It was the best decision I've ever made. Once I'd tasted that freedom, I never wanted to give it back. (They still ask me to move home. In their eyes, an unmarried woman without kids is still a child.)

Looking back, that became my pattern. Rebel, yes, but do the groundwork first.

Fifteen years in a job that didn't fit

When the obvious next step after Honours came up, a PhD, I said no. I already knew science wasn't my long-term path. I took a job as a research assistant instead. It paid, it bought me time to work out what I actually wanted, and if I changed my mind about the PhD the door would still be open.

I stayed 15 years.

Science taught me to think critically and analytically. It trained me to look at a complicated system, strip out the noise and find the logic underneath. But a research salary and a 9-to-5 were never going to buy the kind of freedom I'd wanted since I was a little girl in Fitzroy.

I needed a vehicle that could. I found it in something I could actually touch: property.