Hawaii

In the book’s final segment, the narrator presents the concept of the Golden Man. This idealized person symbolizes foresight and embodies the theme of adapting to survive. Four men are held forth as examples of the Golden Man: Hoxworth Hale, Hong Kong Kee, Shigeo Sakagawa, and Kelly Kanaka. Each man demonstrates an ability to ride the tide and adapt to changing circumstances. Beyond this trait, each man is also multicultural.

 Hoxworth’s grandfather Rafer married Noelani, a Hawaiian. Because she was the Alii Nui, her descendants have all been instilled with island traditions. Hoxworth even knows how to dance the hula. While Hong Kong’s family never intermarried, he is indoctrinated in Western ways from a very early age. After being denied admission to Punahou, Hong Kong receives a crash course in real estate and finance from his father. He then rises to become an important island banker who partners with both an Irishman named McLafferty and the Japanese Shigeo Sakagawa. Shigeo is ethnically Japanese, but he represents an even greater cultural contradiction than the other Golden Men. His father is a staunch Japanese loyalist during World War II, while Shigeo becomes a war hero as an American soldier. Kelly is the embodiment of the new islander since he is a descendant of Hawaiian royalty but is educated at Western schools and functions easily in the white world. His musical partnership with Hong Kong’s daughter and their eventual marriage symbolize the merging of traditions that embody Hawaii’s new cultural identity in the modern age.

However, Michener’s exaltation of this multicultural Golden Man is problematic in its oversimplification. The book’s insinuation that multiculturalism will solve race relations and make Hawaii a unified utopia is undermined by the complicated past of the islands, as previously detailed by the novel. The Golden Man Hypothesis lauds assimilation but fails to acknowledge that mixing customs does not necessarily form one new identity, and that an individual can belong to several cultural identities at once. Further, this view of cultural assimilation within Hawaii ignores the political power imbalances that force such assimilation, such as the coup that led Hawaii to be annexed by the United States.

The word “golden” can also be interrogated: as a color it can be interpreted as racial, referring to a skin tone created by the merging of ethnicities; or its connotations of gold and money tie the Golden Man to capitalistic success, one of the driving forces behind the coup.

When Shigeo, a Golden Man himself, is awarded honorary American citizenship by Texas due to his heroism in the war he revels in his “newly won Americanism,” insinuating that the Golden Man hypothesis is strongly tied to American identity and Hawaii’s imminent statehood.