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My first trip back to Viet Nam in '03 I stayed a few days in a relatively wealthy family's house out from Sai Gon. The family had two daughters and a son. The oldest was a daughter who predated the next one by a couple of years.
The younger two were both immersed in music lessons and schoolwork. The older girl took care of the house and kept the place spotless. She was treated on the surface, a least, no differently from the others but she was different.

Loan made fun of the foreigner and got pretty sarcastic but the second evening when everyone was spread out around the porch that surrounds the house she came to talk to the foreigner. I told her that the house was the best kept house I had ever visited and seemed to be a very happy place. She did not react right then but next morning she fixed me coffee before anyone else and spiced up my breakfast specially. Later when only I and the wife's sister were there and everyone else was gone the sister told me I had brightened up Loan. Then she told me about Loan.

The couple had despaired of having children and purchased a baby that was on the point of being set out on the street, those being the starving years after the takeover. They raised her to be a housekeeper and actually treated her well. She could leave if she wanted to leave but things were pretty hungry out there so she stayed. She is not terribly bright but eminently sensible in her day to day life. She is an adopted daughter of sorts but fits the description of a household slave pretty well. She got an allowance but it was not like a wage. She could go out in the town sometimes but she never went to concerts or school events with the other two. I didn't know what to think about it. They saved her life, surely, but she was, and I am sure still is, a slave.

this story is not so uncommon in the States 60 to 100 years ago. Whether by blood or by need, men and women worked hard in households for subsistence.

We can be very high and mighty about it now, but there was no welfare back then and frankly, retrospectively, I think that requiring civilized behaviors that go with living within a family home, worked for these folks.

My great grands had a man who shoveled coal and did yard work and lived in the basement. He drank.

There was also a nurse who came from the great greats to the great grands and lived out her life mostly with the family and dining each Sunday with us. She was legally blind.
they both had lives and a family to call their own.

I wouldn’t totally judge this badly.