An Insignificant Family( Series - Voices From Vietnam )

Beginning in Vietnam shortly after the end of the American War and ending sometime in 2002, this eighth volume of Curbstone's Voices from Vietnam series follows the relationship between two married writers, Tiep and Dinh, who fall in love. Tiep lives in the southern city of Can Tho, while Dinh lives in Hanoi. Both are in unhappy marriages, but find that, when they decide to divorce their spouses to marry each other, they cannot due to the social and political conditions of the time.

Tiep tries to break free from the preconceived social roles and strives for self-definition, personal liberation, and individual love-her journey coinciding with her country's journey from liberation, through deprivation, to renovation.

Wayne Karlin writes in his introduction: "While feminism is explored in the work of several contemporary Vietnamese writers . . . Da Ngan's direct descriptions of Tiep's sexuality, her co-relation of Tiep's need for erotic satisfaction to her need for independence . . . are rare in translated Vietnamese literature."

Da Ngan was born in 1952 in Can Tho, Vietnam, and served in the Southern Liberation Forces during the American War. She has written a number of novels and short story collections. "An Insignificant Family "won the prize for best fiction from the Union of Writers in Hanoi in 2005.

Rosemary Nguyen's work in literary translation includes an anthology of modern Vietnamese short stories, "Literature News "(Yale University Press), "The Cemetery of Chua Village" (Curbstone Press), and contributions to several other collections of short stories. She currently resides in Hanoi, Vietnam.