"I wanted to test few things. First, how would the publishing houses, the literary class with its critics and the snobs react to a book by a Czech Vietnamese girl? And then how would it be received by the Czech public and the Vietnamese community itself?" says a 39 year old man sporting a leisure jacket and observing the southern Bohemian city of České Budějovice around him.

At Tonda´s

The self-confident host gets nervous only when walking on Krajinská street. He is curious how will Tonda react, he says. In the book, Tonda plays an owner of a Vietnamese restaurant whose daughter tells the story about the Czech rasism, corruption and hypocrisy. Chu Thein Thanh, who locals really dubbed "Tonda", smiles politely after the opening hand-shakes. When we reach one inner courtyard, he points to the windows of an opposite house. The "Dragon Bay" restaurant behind them has been long gone but the colourful mosaic on the floor portraying an Asian dragon still reminds of the latter. It´s the dragon from the cover of the now much discussed book.

"Well now hopefully you believe that I have written the book," says Cempírek and goes on  how he started a hostel nearby and got to know Tonda and his family. When he learned the eatery went out of business in October, 2008, he decided to write a book about a Vietnamese restaurant and in the background he would display the problems of Vietnamese community living together with the Czechs. As a matter of evidence of his intellectual ownership he shows a contract between the Book Club and Lan Pham Thi plus a review of his bank account to which the prize-money was sent. But first things first.

The novelist of České Budějovice has published two books under his real name in the past, Rafinery and Autostop.cz but none of them aroused much appreciation. So the idea of creating an imaginery author was born – inspired, as Cempírek confesses, by the famous French writer Boris Vian and his well known novel I Will Spit On Your Graves.

At first, Cempírek put down the clichés that the Czechs attribute to the Vietnamese – that they work hard, are incapable of mastering the Czech language properly, have big family clans impossible to penetrate for the Czechs, that they bribe the state´s officials etc. „Everybody has this clear view on the Vietnamese yet nobody knows hardly anything about them,“ comments Cempírek. He then added a bit of the Vietnamese mythology, few greetings and swear-words in Vietnamese and a text named „The Legend about the Dragon Bay“ was born, November last year. Beginning of December Jan Cempírek created the identity of Lan Pham Thi: a random internet name, then made-up data from her life and some pictures of a real young Vietnamese girl who lives with a friend of Cempírek in Australia. Then he created the girl´s blog and e-mail address, hence a whole net that will soon catch in everyone eager to communicate with the laureat of the Book Club.

Admit it

Initially he wanted to offer the text to different publishing houses. But just a day before New Year´s Eve, 2008, he changed his plan. The deadline for the Book Club award was running out and so he sent the text there. At the end of March, 2009, Lan Pham Thi received the first three e-mails from the Book Club, all of which confirmed the book had been listed as the winner of this season.

A big gamble then started and few more people got involved, as well. For example a film-maker of Czech TV Pavel Křemen. "Yes, roughly at the beginning of April Cempírek told me the truth and asked me if I´d be interested in shooting a documentary film about the whole story,“ confirms Křemen the intention of Cempírek. But Křemen refused, calling Cempírek´s way a "banal student joke."

Then there was a problem with the contract. Sent via an e-mail, it allegedly went to Kuala Lumpur where Lan Pham This was supposed to be studying environmental management at the university. In reality it only went to České Budějovice. Jan Cempírek had to resolve a problem with a contract that was supposed to have been sent from Malaysia. So he asked a good friend of his from southern Bohemia who was leaving for Malaysia in June to bring the contract along and then send it, with a stamp of a post office in Kuala Lumpur, from there. It happened just as described.

"Only once I wanted to stop it and come clean,“ narrates Cempírek. It was early September of this year when the Book Club held the annually award ceremony and the newly published book was to be officially presented – with the presence of the author. The publishing house insisted on Lan Pham Thi to be there for the ceremony; they even offered to pay for the return ticket from Kuala Lumpur to Prague. Still, the inhabitant of České Budějovice withstood the pressure. He shot a video apology and sent it to the Book Club. Campus of Kuala Lumpur university on the video was in fact a window-glass atrium of faculty of philosophy in České Budějovice. The face of Lan Pham Thi was a Vietnamese friend of Cempírek from southern Bohemia who says in the video, with faultless Czech, that she was sorry but she couldn´t come for the ceremony.

The book made it to be the literary event of autumn 2009 with the Book Club even launching a campaign to promote the novel in the Prague´s tube. Lan Pham Thi was sending interviews to the press via e-mail and kept answering to the readers on her blog. Also, the bank account of Jan Cempírek saw 50.000 CZK from the Book Club pouring in. But he kept just a part of it – to pay off the tax for the prize – and sent the rest to the Vietnamese association for literature and art that currently works on a Czech-Vietnamese dictionary. „Around September 20th we´ve indeed received 40.000 CZK from an unknwn donnor,“ confirms the chairman of the association Nguyen Quyet Tien.

By the beginning of October of this year things started to get uglier. First suspicion that the book might be nothing but a great mystification popped up and less than two months later the suspicion was confirmed. Shortly before the end of November a friend of Cempírek, David Žák, was inviting people from book business for a literary party and „accidentally“ left at the end of the e-mail a communication between him and Cempírek in which Žák is trying to persuade Cempírek to admit the authorship. A day after of the „leak“ Cempírek goes public and aknowledges he is the author. The publishing house is furious but says later on that if Cempírek proves that was indeed him who wrote the novel, the Book Club would sign a deal with him – this time his true him. 

Since then, the print hasn´t ceased to be a hit in bookstores. Only the Czech Vietnamese must wait again – for an authentic story about their life in this country.