In the Erb Memorial Union on Thursday, author, poet and former Western Washington University professor Gary Geddes delivered a reading from his newly released book “Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things: An Impossible Journey from Kabul to Chiapas” to a crowd of roughly 12 people, in a room filled noticeably short of capacity.
“They stayed away in droves,” Geddes said to the laughter of the audience.
Those in attendance speculated that the unusually warm sunshine had drawn away potentially interested students. Geddes, a native of British Columbia, Canada, did not resent the good weather for leaching his potential audience.
“If I lose a few people to the sunlight,” he said with a smirk, “I’ll live with it.”
In his book, Geddes describes several years that he spent recreating the voyages of fifth-century Afghan Buddhist monk and explorer Hui Shen.
According to Geddes, more written evidence of Hui Shen did not survive because of the succession of dynastic rule, which in Chinese history often led to the destruction of historical documents of previous rulers. Geddes said that today, 749 Chinese characters are all that remain as clues to the explorer’s journey.
However, these clues spurred modern researchers to dig deeper into the past to discover more about this elusive explorer.
Geddes said this idea of an “Afghan Columbus” intrigued him ever since first reading of it while editing manuscripts for Oxford University Press in 1974.
Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s editions of “The People’s Almanac,” authors David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace suggested that in 450 A.D. Hui Shen traveled along the Pacific Rim from Afghanistan to China, as far north as British Columbia, and as far east as Central America, reaching the “New World” more than a thousand years before Christopher Columbus.
They also described controversial evidence, which Geddes cited, of Chinese-style, donut-shaped stone anchors discovered off the Channel Islands in California in the 1970s, and shipbuilding tools that were more than 8,000 years old.
Hui Shen himself was “probably a Johnny-come-lately,” said Geddes.
He said he has believed such a voyage was possible ever since he found a Japanese float from a fishing line washed ashore on the beach as a child in Vancouver, British Columbia.
“If a fishing float can come from Japan and end up on a beach in Vancouver,” he said, “then why can’t people?”
“Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things,” he claimed, was a lighthearted but scholarly work – a travel book and also a detective story, retracing the steps of the enigmatic ancient figure.
What had begun as a whimsical quest, though, quickly morphed into a somber exploration of coexistence, he said, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Geddes was on a donkey cart in the remains of an ancient village, in the desert regions of western China, when he learned of the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York City.
“All I could think of,” he said, “was (that) I’m sitting in one ruined city hearing about ruin in another city, back home.”
Literature from publishers HarperCollins describes “Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things” as “an effort to discover important clues for imagining a workable future in the collision of past and present.”
Geddes read two passages from his text, one a reflection of life in Kabul before the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, another an anecdote of getting food poisoning in Pakistan.
At the end, Geddes also took a moment to recognize the students and faculty lost in the Virginia Tech shooting by reading from a poem he had written to commemorate the Kent State shootings in 1970.
Members of the audience remained with Geddes after the event to discuss the book. One, who bought the book after the reading, was especially impressed.
“I like the travel aspect of his writing,” said Rebecca Taylor, a graduate student in the School of Journalism and Communication. “And the way he writes – a melding of his poetry and prose.”