4 ideas
Han is sold as a small child into bonded servitude in a wealthy Chinese household in 1950s Singapore. She grows up beside Wu, the son and heir, first as a servant-playmate and later as the woman he loves. Their love cannot be made legitimate across the gap between owned servant and family heir, and the book follows how the household's rules of class, lineage and tradition turn it into tragedy.
A bondmaid is a girl bought as a child and raised inside the family she serves. She shares its rooms, meals and daily intimacy, but her labor and her future belong to the household. Because she was bought, closeness to the family never becomes kinship: she can live inside it for her whole life without gaining any claim on it.
The same cross-class bond that a household allows between children becomes forbidden once it can affect marriage and inheritance. The boundary is not enforced against affection as such. It is enforced at the point where the relationship could change who belongs to the lineage. To find where a class line is really policed, look for the moment a harmless intimacy starts to carry consequences for succession.
According to the book's description, a publisher asked Catherine Lim to cut the manuscript, and she chose to self-publish it uncut instead. The episode is a case of an author keeping creative control and still reaching a large readership without a traditional publisher's approval.