“White Horse, Gold Dragon” is a trenchant account of discrimination endured by Vietnamese who live in the Czech Republic. But it was not written by a Vietnamese author. So who did write it?
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| The book “White Horse, Gold Dragon”. |
The story began when a 19-year-old Vietnamese girl who is living in the Czech Republic won a prestigious literary prize for her novel, “White Horse, Gold Dragon”, which was still in manuscript. That was electrifying news for the community of Vietnamese in Europe, and was widely reported in Vietnam and elsewhere.
Sadly, Pham Thi Lan is not the author of that book.
Czech journalists had doubted that she was the author of the above book and they made great efforts to find out the truth.
The first to express doubts was a reporter for the Pravo newspaper, Zdenko Pavelka. Pavelka argued this book couldn’t possibly be written by a 19-year-old girl. Since then they started searching for ‘Pham Thi Lan.’
However, Lan never met any reporters in the Czech Republic. She communicated through emails, reasoning that she was studying at the University of Malaysia.
Based on information that Lan provided via email and on her blog, as well the website iDnes.cz, newspaper researchers determined that there was no girl named Lan who was born in 1990 in Sokolov, no Pham Thi Lan who studied at the Pisek high school, and no Vietnamese family with a daughter named Pham Thi Lan in the town of Frantiskoe Lazne, as Lan wrote in her email or blog.
Meanwhile, the book was selling well in the Czech Republic. Readers were attracted by its criticism of current Czech society – particularly racial discrimination – and it partly unveils the life of the 70 thousand-member Vietnamese emigrant community in that country.
Another surprise came when Lan refused to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Prague to receive the prize in early September, even though the publisher of the book offered to cover the airfare.
The Czech Ambassador to Malaysia invited the young talented writer to his embassy in Kuala Lumpur but she sent her regrets, saying that she had returned to the Czech Republic already.
Czech journalists did not give up. They went to the offices of the Vietnamese Association of the Czech Republic and schools where Lan said she had studied but they didn’t find any trace of the mysterious writer. Even at the Passport Agency, they couldn’t find Lan. Howver, someone discovered that the IP of the computer where Lan’s emails were delivered, is not in Kuala Lumpur but in Prague.
They targeted a Czech writer whose writing style, say local critics, is similar to style of the winning manuscript. That writer is Jan Cempirek.
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| The Thi Hong Nhung, the girl who was hired to play Pham Thi Lan in a video clip. |
Cempirek kept silent for three months. He confessed the truth in late November.
The Prague Daily Monotor on November 30 reported that some Vietnamese in the Czech Republic were upset when they learned that the author of the “White Horse, Gold Dragon” is a Czech. The newspaper quoted student Thu Ha, a member of the Vietnam-Czech Friendship Association, as saying that only a Vietnamese knows the kind of information in the book.
The newspaper also cited a jury member of the Denisa Novotna Awards, who expressed her anger at Cempirek but she admitted that he didn’t violate copyright or the rules of the award.
“I have to continue this game because it opens a new topic, with new factors⦠and I plan to write about this nasty trick,” Cempirek stated in the Lidove newspaper.
The case becamed more complicated when a Vietnamese girl in the Czech Republic confessed to the local media that Cempirek hired her to play Pham Thi Lan in a video clip in which Lan thanked the Scahs Club for the award but refused to return to Czech to receive it.
A day before this girl exposed this truth, Cempirek stated on a local newspaper that Pham Thi Lan was somewhere in Australia. This scandal, thus, now had two Pham Thi Lans. Cempirek, the true author of the book, still keeps the location of the first Lan a secret and the second Lan is the one who was hired to play Lan in the video clip.
The second Lan, according to Denik newspaper, is The Thi Hong Nhung, 18, who is living in Trhove Sviny. The video clip was not shot in Kuala Lumpur but in the Czech Republic.
Hong Nhung told Denik that in her opinion, this book cannot be written by a young girl and that after this truth was unveiled, she was teased by her schoolmates. However, she said she doesn’t hate Cempirek because this writer has helped Czech people to understand more about the community of Vietnamese.
The local public still wants to know who is the first Lan.
The views of Vietnamese emigrants in the Czech Republic
Bui Thuy Linh, 37, a businesswoman in Kladno, said: “I read an article introducing this novel on an online Vietnamese newspaper here. If the author is a Vietnamese, it is of course a matter of pride for the community of Vietnamese here. But if the author is a native Czech, I still love him because he dared to reflect the society and partly defend Vietnamese people. I regret that I can’t read the book in the Czech language to understand the story thoroughly. But I bought the book for my kids and my Czech staffs”.
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| Writer Jan Cempirek, the author of “White Horse, Gold Dragon”. |
Another Vietnamese businessman named Chu Tien Thanh told iDnes newspaper that he read the book twice and likes it very much. He doesn’t care who is the author of that book. He said he saw part of himself in the book.
Also to iDnes, Marcel Winter, Chairman of the Vietnam-Czech Friendship Association, said: “It was a mistake for the author to hide himself behinds a Vietnamese name but it is helpful for the Vietnamese community⦠I thank Jan Cempirek for his alias of Pham Thi Lan and the winning book ‘White Horse, Yellow Dragon,” though I regret his lie to the organizing board.”
“Many Czech people have sympathized with the pains of Vietnamese. According to the law here, they have the duties to pay tax and insurance⦠but they don’t have any benefits. They are always the targets for envy and discrimination. They work hard and their children have good achievements at school. The book is helps Czech society to get nearer to the Vietnamese community,” Winter said.
Dinh Quoc Hoi, who is living in Prague, wrote: “This book is very famous in the Czech Republic. It has told the Czechs about the pains Vietnamese feel when they suffer discrimination. In the last two weeks, two clothing shops owned by Vietnamese in Ostrave were burnt by extremists”.
VietNamNet/Tuoi Tre
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