Hawaii - James Michener [544]
Now Goro began to whimper like a child, and two men from his outfit had the decency to cover him with a blanket, so that his disintegration would not be visible to his own troops, and in this condition they patiently led him, shivering and shuddering, out of the Vosges Mountains where the Texans had been trapped.
Toward the foothills they passed through a guard unit from their own battalion, and a young lieutenant from Able Company, a haole boy from Princeton asked, "Who you got under the blanket?" and Shigeo replied, "Lieutenant Sakagawa."
"Was he the one who got through to the Texans?"
"Who else?" Shig replied, and as the cortege of wounded and near-mad and starved and war-torn passed, the Princeton man looked at Goro Sakagawa's mechanically shuffling feet and muttered, "There goes an American."
VI
The Golden Men
IN 1946, when Nyuk Tsin was ninety-nine years old, a group of sociologists in Hawaii were perfecting a concept whose vague outlines had occupied them for some years, and quietly among themselves they suggested that in Hawaii a new type of man was being developed. He was a man influenced by both the west and the east, a man at home in either the business councils of New York or the philosophical retreats of Kyoto, a man wholly modern and American yet in tune with the ancient and the Oriental. The name they invented for him was the Golden Man.
At first I erroneously thought that both the concept and the name were derived from the fact that when races intermingled sexually, the result was apt to be a man neither all white nor all brown nor all yellow, but somewhere in between; and I thought that the Golden Man concept referred to the coloring of the new man--a blend of Chinese, Polynesian and Caucasian, for at this time Japanese rarely intermarried--and I went about the streets of Hawaii looking for the golden man of whom the sociologists spoke.
But in time I realized that this bright, hopeful man of the future, this unique contribution of Hawaii to the rest of the world, did not depend for his genesis upon racial intermarriage at all. He was a product of the mind. His was a way of thought, and not of birth, and one day I discovered, with some joy I may add, that for several years I had known the archetypes of the Golden Man, and if the reader has followed my story so far, he also knows three of them well and is about to meet the fourth, and it is interesting that none of these, in a direct sense, owed his golden quality to racial intermixtures. His awareness of the future and his rare ability to stand at the conflux of the world he owed to his understanding of the movements around him. I have known a good many golden men in the secondary, or unimportant, sense: fine Chinese-Hawaiians, excellent Portuguese-Chinese and able Caucasian-Hawaiians; but most of them had little concept of what was happening either in Hawaii or in the world. But the four men of whom I now wish to speak did know, and it is in reference to their knowledge that I wish to end my story of Hawaii, for they are indeed the Golden Men.
In 1946, when the war had ended and Hawaii was about to explode belatedly into the twentieth century, Hoxworth Hale was forty-eight years old; and one morning, when the trade winds had died away and the weather was unbearably sticky, he happened to look into his mirror while shaving, and the thought came to him: "This year I am as good a man as I shall ever be in this life. I have most of my teeth, a good deal of my hair, I'm not too much overweight,