Because of its odd jurisdictional arrangements, Shanghai was a free city—one needed no passport or visa to enter. Thus as war ravaged Europe, huge numbers of the suddenly stateless arrived in Shanghai seeking refuge. The White Russians came first, fleeing the revolution by the tens of thousands, and eventually forming the largest foreign community after the Japanese. There were six daily Russian newspapers; a popular Russian bookstore, Russkoe Delo, with an inventory of fifteen thousand volumes; and a Russian radio station. The shabby elegance of the White Russians played a huge role in the city’s expat culture. Most of the big hotels had Russian orchestras and singers. Impoverished masters living in tiny cellar rooms gave music lessons. Former White Russian soldiers earned a living as nightclub bouncers or bodyguards for the warlords who still ruled much of China.
Shanghai’s refugee community ballooned still further in the late 1930s as Hitler consolidated power and more than eighteen thousand Jews poured in. The Nazis had allowed them to take only twenty reichsmarks and a suitcase, so they arrived desperately poor. Many quickly set about selling whatever they’d been able to carry out, “everything from handbags and rugs and porcelain to shoelaces,” in the words of one Shanghai journalist. “All the moneyed residents of Shanghai went mad for Austrian glassware and china.” Some of the Jews were able to raise enough money to rent a room or two and start small businesses. Others crowded into refugee camps at the city’s edge.
When Eugenia arrived, many other diplomatic wives, less used to instability than she was, were leaving for what seemed like safer outposts in Hong Kong and Manila. After setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo, in China’s north, in 1931, the Japanese had slowly closed in on Shanghai, and in 1937 they seized control of the city’s Chinese areas and put them under the control of Chinese puppet rulers. The occupiers waged a terror campaign against their political enemies. Severed heads of Chinese seen as opponents of the Japanese appeared on lampposts around town. American and European journalists were targeted as well; someone threw a grenade at the celebrated correspondent John B. Powell, despite the presence of a bodyguard.
Officially, protections for the international communities in Shanghai remained in place. However, after the defeat of France by Germany in 1940, control of Shanghai’s French Concession passed to the Vichy government, which was collaborating with the Nazis. Japan joined the Axis powers in September of that year, making the city’s status as a refuge even more fragile. As the American and British colonies shrank, the German presence grew. A Nazi newspaper was printed and sold in the International Settlement.
This was a strange environment in which to open a yoga school, but Eugenia was determined to do as her master had said. At first, when she informed her husband that she would no longer content herself with an “empty social life” and that she intended to work, he was amused and condescending. After all, what did she know how to do? When she told him she planned to teach yoga, he was mortified—for a diplomat in China, “face” was everything. “Do anything you want, but not this nonsense, please,” he said. It seemed to him, she writes, just “the crazy idea of an idle society woman, who happened to be his wife.”
Jan was already on edge. He was a diplomat of a government that no longer existed. The Nazi Wehrmacht had marched into Czechoslovakia in March 1939. From London, Edvard Beneš, president of the first Czechoslovak Republic, set up a Czech government-in-exile. Strakaty prevailed on the Czech ambassador to China, Jan Seba, not to hand over the embassy to the Germans, but Seba didn’t listen. Yet, instead of quitting in protest, Strakaty stayed on, working with the German trade representative, a decision that aroused suspicion among some of his countrymen.
There were several hundred Czechs in Shanghai, and they formed a resistance organization, the Czechoslovak Circle, which rejected all contact and cooperation with Nazi Germany. Strakaty was active in the Circle—by January 1940 he had become its second vice president—but he wavered in his commitment. No one knew how the war was going to go. Unlike the Americans and the British, neither he nor his wife had a country to return to. The destitute refugees filling the city were a reminder of the degradation of dispossession.
Eugenia, like her husband, had an instinct for survival that vied with her idealism. Though she’d had the option of receiving a Soviet passport on account of her Latvian origins, she’d opted instead to get a protectorate passport from the German embassy, which provided her with a modicum of safety. (Jan had kept his Czech passport.) She hated Nazism and was enormously concerned about Shanghai’s Jews, but she was also a stateless person, and she saw the direction the war seemed to be moving in.
As he tried to secure his place in this chaotic new world, Strakaty began developing a reputation for unsteadiness and cowardice, qualities he tried to mask with swaggering boasts. “The members of the ‘Circle’ were mostly brave and unyielding of values, thus showing qualities not found in that crucial era in some indecisive, cautious or fearful people,” reads a confidential 1946 memo from the Czech ambassador in China. “Mr. Strakatý appears to belong to the latter category.” In the summer of 1939, before Eugenia arrived, he’d already been thrown out of a secret Czech resistance committee (separate from the Circle), which he’d joined in the spring.
Shortly after Eugenia got to Shanghai, Strakaty received an order from Berlin to hand his office directly over to the Germans. He told the Circle he wouldn’t do it. Then, it seems, the Germans made him an offer, and on January 18 he capitulated, “without prior notification of the Circle committee, notwithstanding how he used to boast his bravery in the presence of the Committee members,” in the words of a postwar Czech government report on the matter. In return, the Germans made him a payment of “several monthly salaries.” With the proceeds, he bought a small noodle factory. (A few years later, he expanded into sausage manufacturing, something that didn’t much please his strictly vegetarian wife.)
Because of his apparent inconstancy, Strakaty was thrown out of the Czechoslovak Circle. He and Jan Seba tried to create an alternative organization, the Association of Czech and Slovak Residents in China, but it attracted barely enough members to fill its governing committee.
In order not to embarrass her husband further, Eugenia didn’t use her married name when she set herself up as a teacher. Sometimes she introduced herself as Regina Petersen. Other times, using the name from her cinema days, she called herself Indira Devi. Occasionally, perhaps in homage to her recently lost love, she shortened the first name to Indra.
Students did not flock to her. Shanghai had a Theosophical Society, and the Russians brought with them their interest in the occult, but hatha yoga was still largely unknown. The first person to call on her wanted to know if she could communicate with spirits. A month after finding space in a gymnasium and starting her new venture, she didn’t have a single student. Then someone suggested she put on a conference for people in the diplomatic world, inviting them to learn what yoga actually was. She did, and soon a number of curious American women showed up for class, including Josie Stanton, the American consul’s wife. Other people connected to the embassy followed. Devi was invited to give further talks: at the European Medical Association, the Chinese Buddhist Society, the American Community Church, and the Theosophical Lodge. She even presented at the Rotary Club.
Soon her classes outgrew the space she was renting in the gym. At the time, she and her husband were living in hotels, and one of her students found them a flat in the elegant Gascogne apartment building on Avenue Joffre in the French Concession, with the condition that she hold yoga classes there. By day, Devi turned the drawing room into a yoga studio, carefully moving all the furniture back in its place so no trace would be left when Strakaty got home. Soon her beloved mother came to Shanghai to join her, escaping the war in Europe.
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When the classes outgrew the apartment, another student arranged for the Strakatys to move into a bungalow on Rue Francis Garnier owned by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, wife of the Nationalist Party lead
er Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. (At the time, Chiang and his wife were living in Chungking, hundreds of miles to the west, where he had set up a provisional government.) “We did the exercises in Madame’s bedroom, which was large enough to hold 25 pupils,” Devi recalled years later. She hired a young Russian poet named Michael Volin and his wife, Elena, as assistants, and with their help, she was able to hold up to five classes a day, teaching hundreds of students. (Years later, Volin would become known as the man who brought yoga to Australia.)
None of Devi’s classes before the 1960s was recorded, but judging from her books, her system seems to have stayed the same for her first few decades as a teacher. “Before we start on our lesson today, let me greet you, and welcome you to our class,” begins a session captured on vinyl, her voice trilling, her crisp words spoken in an indefinable eastern European accent. “I hope you will be a good pupil, and that yoga postures will do to you what you expect them to do to you.”
She began by having her students practice deep, rhythmic breathing, urging them to sit up straighter and to use the back of the throat to push air in and out. “Very relaxed! Not being stiff,” she commanded. She led her class through a number of respiration exercises. They began lying down, breathing in and out to slow counts of four. Then they stood up, inhaled, and held their breath before exhaling, as she commanded, “with great force. Out all the impurities. Especially people who smoke!”
After that came neck rolls and stretches, eye exercises, and “sound vibrations” (one or two syllables held as long as possible). As was her fashion, she explained the efficacy of this chanting in empirical terms: “Very few people realize the importance and the potency of the vibrations that we can produce by our voice, because it gives like an inner massage to the entire body, our glands, our organs are getting the benefit of these inner vibrations.” The classs began with “eeeeeeeaaaaahhhhh,” then proceeded to “aaaaaaaaeeewwww,” and finally the familiar “oooohhmmmm.”
Unlike most contemporary teachers, she led her students through deep relaxation before starting them on asanas, having them lie on their backs and systemically let go of tension in each part of the body, beginning with the toes. “Imagine for a while…that you are a cloud,” she said. “Very light, very relaxed, just floating in the sky, passing by another cloud, and gently gliding along, over a green valley…over a lake in which you can see your reflection like in a mirror.” She told them to keep out all thoughts of their lives and let themselves sink into nothingness, and then to start breathing in “vital cosmic energy.”
Only after twenty or so minutes of preliminaries did the asanas begin. As she led her students from a bridge into a shoulder stand—she called it “the reverse posture—she explained that the latter was a “youth-giving posture. It has an effect on our thyroid glands and on our sex glands, and because of that it is supposed to banish premature wrinkles, give vitality, and keep us in a youthful condition much more than you would expect.” She took her students through gentle backbends (cobra and locust, or Salabhasana), explaining the promised physical benefits as she went. She had them attempt lotus pose and then bend forward, foreheads on the floor, which she said would help to keep the intestinal tract clean.
“In the more advanced stages of yoga, this posture is helping us to develop our spiritual qualities, because it helps to awaken our kundalini, our dormant powers,” she said. “But in the first stage, it will just help you to keep in good health.” She was a big believer in the power of the headstand, using a wall to help novice students get upside down. The classes weren’t vigorous, but they were challenging, particularly for those with tight hips, who had a hard time folding their legs into lotus pose.
Most of Eugenia’s pupils were Americans. A customs official in his fifties became a convert after six weeks of yoga eased the headaches that had plagued him all his life. Another student, a thin woman whom Devi called “Mrs. B.,” was wracked with insomnia and anxiety that made her nearly suicidal. After six months of classes, Devi writes, she “looked the picture of health…and swore she would not touch medicines any more.” Eugenia gave lessons to a young Chinese boy suffering from asthma who, after two months, brought her a huge bouquet of flowers from his grateful parents.
Eugenia moved easily among the eccentric remnant of Shanghai’s expat society. The American military attaché remembered her as one of the few White Russians who was fully accepted by the American colony, which sometimes led to envy among her countrymen. She certainly didn’t share the White Russians’ customary prejudices, throwing herself into fund-raising for the city’s Jewish refugees. Occasionally, over Jan’s embarrassed objections, she’d give benefit performances of dances she’d learned in Bombay. “I don’t know anything about India but I thought she danced awfully well,” writes journalist Emily Hahn.
Hahn, who went by the nickname Mickey, was one of Shanghai’s most intriguing characters. A beautiful Jewish woman from St. Louis with dark bobbed hair and wry almond eyes, she shared Eugenia’s intrepid spirit, if not her spiritual longings. Hahn had worked as a horseback guide in New Mexico in the 1920s and traveled through Central Africa on her own in the 1930s, serving for a while at a medical clinic in the Belgian Congo reachable only by boat. She’d ended up in Shanghai somewhat by accident, after taking a trip to the Orient with her sister to distract herself after a failed romance with the Hollywood screenwriter Eddie Mayer. She fell in love with China and stayed, publishing dispatches and autobiographical short stories in The New Yorker and other publications.
Hahn had a number of dalliances, among them with the extravagantly wealthy businessman Sir Ellice Victor Sassoon, part of a family of Baghdadi Jews known as the Rothschilds of the East. He gave her a shiny blue Chevrolet coupe that she drove to get out of the city on weekends. The man Hahn was closest to, though, was Sinmay Zau, an elegant, irreverent, and married Chinese poet. He was the one who introduced her to opium, a vice on which, for a time, she was dependent.
It was a shocking thing, in Shanghai’s colonialist expat culture, for an American woman to take a Chinese lover. Hahn didn’t care. She enjoyed her scandalous, exotic image. Having fallen in love with apes in Africa, she bought herself a pet gibbon that she named Mr. Mills. Beige with a black face, Mr. Mills stood about a foot and a half tall. Hahn took him everywhere, often perched on her shoulder. When she went to dinner parties, she dressed him up in a diaper and fur suit made of trimmings from her sable coat. Later, she added old, sick Mrs. Mills to the household—the sight of the pitiful ape in a pet shop had been too heartbreaking for her to resist.
Hahn and Eugenia became fast friends. They met when Eugenia was seeking Indian musicians for one of her performances and someone sent her to Hahn, who knew everyone. (One of Hahn’s suitors was there that day and suggested that Eugenia look among the Indian policemen, which she ended up doing.) After that, Eugenia often called on Hahn. “She was an eccentric person, fond of refugees, Yogi, India and Indian dances—any number of disassociated interests,” Hahn writes. Eugenia had introduced herself as Regina Petersen, and Hahn called her Peter.
Not all Hahn’s friends appreciated her primates. One Englishwoman enraged the journalist by inviting her to a party but writing on the invitation, “Sorry we cannot extend invitation to Mr. Mills.” Eugenia, however, adored them. Hahn recalled, “Once when Peter…dashed in and kissed me, Mrs. Mills bit her savagely, sinking her tusks in up to the gums. I was scared to death, but Peter as a gibbon lover refused to complain.”
Like Hahn, Eugenia tended to her image. Since studying with Krishnamacharya, she’d committed herself to monthly days of silence, a practice she kept up for the rest of her life. Still, rather than stay home in quiet meditation, she went out and about in the city, “shaking her head and placing her finger to her lips mysteriously if some uninitiated person spoke to her,” writes Hahn.
These days of silence drove Eugenia’s husband mad; he accused her of mindlessly imitating Gandhi and told their friends that if she could, she’d go about
in a loincloth. Yet Hahn and her lover found Eugenia’s quirks delightful. “Sinmay adored her in his own way; she appealed to his love of the bizarre,” Hahn writes. “He could sit and watch her for hours, smiling to himself, now and then asking a question guaranteed to send her pelting off in pursuit of one of her hobbies.”
Hahn had little patience, however, for Eugenia’s attempts to enlist her in her schemes to help Shanghai’s Jewish refugees, an issue that already consumed Hahn. “I was spending ninety per cent of my time on them anyway,” she writes. “Peter added the missing ten per cent to my program.” When Hahn protested, Eugenia just laughed and gave her an affectionate pat on the cheek. Once, Eugenia brought a young Jewish writer named Mr. Levin to Hahn’s home, hoping the journalist could help him. Hahn was tremendously irritated—so much so, in fact, that she realized she was becoming completely burned out. “Mr. Levin’s image pursued me; I could not shake it off my mind,” she writes. “His silly, self-eager face, his boyish prattle, summed up for me all of demanding humanity. It seemed to me suddenly that all the clocks in Shanghai were ticking fast and faster, and my heart beat slow and slower.” She wanted to leave town, but the Japanese occupation made travel difficult. So she withdrew for a while, asking her servants to tell all visitors that she wasn’t at home.
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