Growing up in a Pakistani household I was expected not to question or disrespect my father in any way. My father who was raised in Pakistan was a stern man, and stubborn at that. My father and I never really talked about anything serious. There came a point where I started to think and express my own opinions, which were different from what my father had. Over the past year I had become more independent of my father due the growing differences between both of us. Being raised in different societies caused a major conflict between my father and I, but now I realized that I could embrace a new culture, and still keep traditional values.
It was six o'clock in the morning, the time I usually wake up for school. My eyes felt as if they weighed a hundred pounds. It felt like I had just closed my eyes, only a second later to open them. I had stayed up the night before working with my father at his restaurant until two in the morning, and I was exhausted. He always had some type of task he was working on, and I would always help. It bothered me that other boys could come home and do their school work, then play. I was also not allowed to have female classmates as friends. I could not even call them for assignments. This is something I didn't understand at all. I could not talk to my father about these issues because "the discussion was closed." As I kept these feelings bottled up inside I started to resent my father and feel more rebellious towards him.
One day I didn't come home after school and went straight to a friend's house, knowing this would upset my father. Because I went home late that day, my father yelled at me. He was not worried, but angry that I did not come home, which upset me. At that point I felt like a volcano which had not erupted for years. I was ready to explode with all of these feelings inside. I blew up on my father and yelled at him, something I had never done. I told him that America was not same, and he could not