When Jeap told her teacher that she would have to quit flamenco lessons and return home, Inhof had other plans. “She said she was going to miss me in the class because she saw something in me and she wanted to give me this opportunity to learn with her.” If Jeap agreed to two demands — that she would attend every class and remain fiercely dedicated, two things she had already demonstrated she was capable of — Inhof would allow her to study for free. Jeap consented. She would stay in Hungary.

For a moment, Jeap broke from her narrative. “I feel that [Inhof’s generosity] is one of the most amazing things that has happened to me in my life,” she said. “Now I am giving back.”

Culturally homogeneous, Thailand has historically refused to recognize the citizenship of many ethnic minorities — locally referred to as “hill tribes” — many of who reside along the country’s borders. Because of Chiang Mai’s proximity to Thailand’s northern border, many organizations in the city work to support ethnic minorities who are not entitled to education or health care. “I am giving one lovely hill tribe girl the same thing [as Inhof] by letting her study with me for free with no time limit,” Jeap wrote, in an e-mail exchange after our conversation. “Now she has been studying with me for almost a year.”

Hungary, on the heels of Inhof, eventually revealed its more charitable side. “[Hungarians] have very beautiful hearts,” Jeap said. “I lived with my friend, who I had met in the dance class for free by cleaning and cooking Thai food for her everyday.” Soon, she found a job teaching Thai traditional dance to Hungarian children. At the surface this meant a modest income, something Jeap desperately needed. But a teaching job also meant something more; weekly interactions with Hungarian children provided a stage for cultural assumptions about feeling and movement to play out.

“Flamenco people say that it’s a passionate, hard, tough dance, and many Thai or Asian [people] won’t like it,” she said. “When I was teaching Thai dance in Hungary it was interesting for me to be able to teach Western girls Thai dance. They try to bring the sweetness inside out.”

After six months in Hungary, Jeap returned to Thailand, “I felt sad, but at the same time I wanted to show what I had done so hard there by making a good performance for Thai people, for friends and family who were waiting for me.” Jeap began the search for a trained Flamenco musician with whom she could perform. “[Chiang Mai has] so many talented musicians,” she said, “But not flamenco.” Eventually, she was forced to make do; with her feet as drums, Jeap taught herself to combine the flamenco rhythms being beat out by her body with the contemporary rhythms being played by Chiang Mai musicians.

“[In] flamenco dance, the feet are drums,” she said. “So, you just have to use the technique and combine it with the rhythms you hear from the music. We perform together, [the musician and me]. I feel myself as drums too because I do it with my feet. So, we both are performers and we just share. We just have different instruments, that’s all. My instrument is my feet. So, we are just like talking, fighting, joking with each other, by using the rhythms of drums.”

The mark of Jeap’s first language, Thai, is nearly indiscernible when she speaks English. She doesn’t make common pronunciation errors — “th,” a consonant combination that doesn’t exist in Thai, is challenging for many Thai English-speakers. Jeap speaks clearly through words like “rhythm” or “together” though, and her pronunciation nears that of a native speaker’s. But when she uses words that begin with “d,” the sound is harsh and heavy — words like “don’t” and “drums” are throatier than a native speaker’s, and sound like quick, bellowing cries. Most likely drawn from the Thai consonant “dt,” it is the only sound that betrays Jeap’s background, and when I resume listening to the recording of our interview, I am continuously thrust back to her childhood in Thailand. “I had been doing Thai traditional dance and music for a long time,” she said at the start of our conversation. “Normally Thai dance shows the softness, the niceness, the beauty of movement.”

“Thai ladies are quite shy. [Thai] culture, it doesn’t support women to stand up and to be really confident and say what they want to say from inside,” Jeap said. On returning to Thailand from Hungary, she had to confront a staggering truth: the craft she had worked so hard to master was, by virtue, at odds with her home culture. A document of gypsy populations, flamenco is an expression of pains — poverty, hunger, and oppression. Though Thai people are not unfamiliar with these afflictions, the idea of expressing hardship in a confrontational manner is upsetting to a culture that puts “saving face” — the concept of not causing others to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable — above all else. “Flamenco brings out the darkness from women. Many Thai [people] couldn’t accept this.” The most common question Jeap fields after a performance? “I have to answer, I think, more than 100 times why I don’t smile while I’m dancing flamenco,” she said.

“When you dance you feel the music. You don’t dance and think that you feel something else. Flamenco is very honest. The music drives you to feel that too, so that’s why you can’t smile when its loneliness.”

Like a third-culture kid, Jeap straddles the space between Thailand and Spain. She has never traveled to the latter — “Shadow Whisper was a project that I used to try to raise a scholarship for my study in Spain. But the profits were quite small. So, my dream to go to Spain was broken — maybe next time.” She knows Spain, and Spanish people, only by way of Flamenco, by studying its hard and confrontational way of display. But she is a product of the former, of Thailand, and she understands well the expressive tone of her home country — soft, delicate, and passive.

Wearing a black and white wrap dress fitted at the waist, her dark hair in a tight, low ponytail, Jeap looked very much the part of a flamenco dancer when we met. But as conversation approached the subject matter of dance’s ability to change her identity, she was quick to accept certain immutability, “I’ve been dancing flamenco for 13 years. I still say I’m Thai. I have Thai blood.”

Jeap is less quick to draw lines when it comes to the dancer’s mind, to the woman beneath the stage presence. “I think the women in the world are just the same,” she said. “We just show the part that we grew up with.” Early in life, Jeap expressed herself through Thai dance — the art she “grew up with” — but for her there was always something missing. Flamenco offered a dance that she felt she could move more comfortably through. It wasn’t a difference of feeling that drew her across the world — “I think inner we all share,” Jeap said — but a desire to speak in a new way. Like the Thai practice of giving a newborn a nickname, Jeap had not changed — only the name by which she preferred to be called.

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