A Matter of Honor

The gun sits in my lap, and today honor requires that one man must die. Whether it is me, a suicide to preserve what honor is left to my wife and children, or Mr. Butler, who has no concept of honor or his part in it, remains undecided.

I have removed my yellow vest, the uniform of my current profession, a “Friendly Helping Hand!” to those who need bags carried or metal shopping carts (known as “buggies” locally, I remind myself automatically, even now trying to assimilate) returned to their metal corrals. Instead, I have donned the suit, waistcoat, and tie that is appropriate to an accounting professional at a firm such as Hanscom and Norris.

I remember. Remember when I first came to Hanscom and Norris. My first airplane ride. My first time in America. My first time out of my province even. 28 years, it has been. 28 years since, for reasons I still don't understand, Mr. Hanscom (or Mr. Norris, neither ever let on) took notice of a young accountant at a minor subsidiary. Took notice, informed my superiors, and sent me, and later Mai and little Shen, to the United States to pursue my “American Dream.”

For 28 years, my American Dream found me. A home which I owned (though Mai, always the practical one, would remind me that it was truly owned by The Bank), a job where I was respected and rewarded. A chance to ply my trade and bring honor to myself and my wife and children with excellent work and promotional opportunities.

I was always attracted to numbers, even as a child. My bookish nature confused my Father, who never learned to count higher than the number of cows in his fields, and delighted my Mother, who I suspect once held secret dreams of a life beyond a farmer's wife. But they sang to me, as the swelling symphonies of Bach (mathematically precise in his own fashion) sings to the cellist, as the clouds sing to a pilot. As love sings to the romantic.

It was their permanence that delighted me, their unchanging nature. In a world of war, shifting borders, imprecise language and illogical action, 1+1 always equaled 2, whether you lived under a dictator or a President, whether you played cello or (like me) had no knack for the arts. Unlike the sound of one hand clapping, the riddle of X can always be solved, given the right information. From there, accountancy was a logical career. While there was a certain worrisome impermanence in the movement of decimals on a screen to transfer sums of money from one account to another (all fictitious in a literal sense, themselves made up only of numbers on a screen), but underlying it all was basic mathematics. Whether carrying sacks full of dollar bills to a bank vault by hand or typing a number into a computer screen, sums were required. And sums were my true love.

Until Mai.

At University, I had no time for romance. While my classmates enjoyed the social aspects of being free from home for the first time, I endeavored to pull ahead, my mind on my mathematics. The life of a beef farmer awaited failure and a life where 40 cows equals normalcy and 38 cows equals a fence in need of mending was not one I could imagine. But Mai cracked my shell, as I cracked hers. Two bookworms closing down the library each night, me lost in mathematical theory, her in the collected works of Coleridge. Together we walked alone to our respective dormitory buildings, until one of us (her, as romantic as the poets she so cherished) realized we were walking together.

We were married soon after graduation, and Shen was born ten months hence.

Shen! While Mai taught me love in all its imprecision, Shen taught me joy. Toddlers are, as a rule, illogical creatures and, to my feigned dismay, my tottering, burbling storm act of God had all of Mai's romantic notions, wrapped up in the destructive tendencies of Gojira. Peals of laughter filled our apartment in the immediate aftermath of the shattering of a lamp, or an ornament, or a keepsake not kept out of reach.

While it was my career that sent us to the bewildering cities within forests that is Alabama, it was Mai and Shen who thrived. Already proficient in English from her reading, Mai insisted Shen be bi-lingual from her first words. The mysteries of the American South were only minor head scratchers to Mai, who sometimes remarked that Birmingham bore little resemblance to Gone With the Wind or To Kill a Mockingbird. She almost immediately caught the odd phrasing and linguistic idioms of the region, long before I stopped worrying that I sounded like the unfortunate carolers in the popular film shown on television at Christmas, always concerned someone would request a rousing “fa ra ra” from me.

But if Mai conquered the cultural side of Birmingham, I was equally the conqueror at Hanscom and Norris. I liked my colleagues, first a semi-formal politeness of my home and later an informal friendship that turned me from Mr. Goto to Hiroyuki to eventually Hiro, which made my colleagues laugh when I remarked I sounded like a member of the Super Friends on TV. “Bigger than a trophy wife's credit limit!”, one shouted. “Able to leap tall actuary tables in a single bound!” cried another. I searched these jests for dishonor, for making fun of the token Asian, but found none.

But, my, how slow they were...

I at first thought it laziness, a cavalier attitude toward work that was, quite literally, foreign to me. But as I assimilated into their culture, I realized it was an organizational choice, a substitute family that made up in loyalty what it lacked in efficiency. “C'mon!”, Mr. Norris would shout, in that thick and hard to understand drawl, from the company kitchen. “Hiro! Get in here and grab some cake! It's Suze's birthday for God's sake!”

Even after Mr. Hanscom, and eventually Mr. Norris retired, young Mr. Hanscom kept the example (young Mr. Norris having brought shame to his Father in an endless loop of drugs and prison), showing a remarkable capacity to know the names, ages, and stories of every employee, from the Vice President to the woman who cleaned up the toilet facilities after the office closed.

Then came Mr. Butler...

It was not a title of honor, for Mr. Butler found honor to be “unprofitable”, or one of great respect for age, as he was barely more than Shen's age. It was not as it was with Mr. Norris and Mr. Hanscom, who remained so long after Suze and Charlie and Wally became so, despite repeated attempts to get me to call them Dick and Ron. Mr. Butler insisted on the honorific because it brought him power. He cared nothing for the respect of his underlings. The name was meant to invoke fear, not love. And it did.

Mr. Butler entered when young Mr. Hanscom (who was now middle-aged and balding Mr. Hanscom, truth be told) sold out to a corporate interest. All would remain, he assured us before retiring to be with his grandchildren in Los Alamos, it was part of the deal. The team remained whole.

His bargain lasted 9 months. Then, like a demon child delivered by a wicked midwife in a Saturday Night Horror film, Mr. Butler was born. An expert in “Organizational Optimization” and “Right Sizing”, Mr. Butler's job was to fire people. To fire Suze or Charlie or Wally or Dwayne... or Hiro. The goal was profit, nothing else. How cruel fate, looking back, that the movement of decimals on a spreadsheet, which brought me joy, a career, and a life of respect in America, could take it all away so callously, without even a visit, or a phone call, or a farewell party in the company kitchen with cake, or even a printed document, but in an e-mail.

It said all the right words. “We value your time, we appreciate all you have done for us, unfortunate financial hardships preventing severance pay,” and more. But what the e-mail really said was “Hiro, get out. A younger man who probably loved numbers as a child like you will take your place for two-thirds the salary.”

When I tried to see Mr. Butler, he would not permit me, his Secretary (as cold and dishonorable as he) reminding me that I no longer worked for Hanscom and Norris and Mr. Butler was a busy man. And busy he was. Suze joined me in unemployment soon after, less than a year before her anticipated retirement cake in the company kitchen. Dwayne was also “right sized.”

Two years before Mai could hold the title to our home in her hands and quit worrying about The Bank. Two years before I had a physical inheritance for Shen, her wife Rachel, and their son Scout. Two years before my American Dream was truly realized.

Because Mr. Butler's shareholders' “American Dream” of unseemly profits and more unseemly extravagance was paramount.

I tried to find another job, but 55 year old Asian accountants were not in demand, especially in a world full of Mr. Butlers filling the unemployment halls with others like me.

The job pushing carts and fetching hemorrhoid cream for elderly ladies was a last effort to keep the home. To keep honor. I heard of people being “reduced” to menial labor, but the labor never bothered me. The chaos, both professionally and personally, did. The world of large chain groceries is a Hell of imprecision. “Buggies” left lying anywhere, boxes of cake mixes mingling with the frozen dinners (For Those On The Go Days!), irregular shifts, and underwhelming pay.

The final straw came in the form of an envelope marked “Final Notice.” Mai tried to keep the mortgage current on the salary of a teacher of literature for young children. Shen even tried to help, deepening my dishonor. But inevitably, finally, the back payments mounted and the “Final Notice” came. Mai cried, the first tears of sadness I had seen from her since her Mother died. My wife, who taught me love, who gave me joy from her own body, who endured the long nights of accountancy at the office and longer hours of spreadsheets filling our kitchen table, crying.

Crying because I could not provide.

Shen would scold me to hear that. Her feminist values gives me pride because it means she will fight for her success. And, because she is Mai's, she will fight with honor. But Shen barely remembers home. She was in swaddling when we first took that airplane ride and she has only been back a few times since. Shen is American.

She doesn't understand our ways.

My father, taking night jobs at a local public house one particularly hard year for cattle, caught me awake, reading in the darkened hours of sleep, as he just finished his shift as a “bar back.” He pulled me into our kitchen and made me look at his weary eyes, at his blistered hands, to hear his hesitant voice that felt heavier than one thousand of the barrels he wrestled nightly. “Hiroyuki,” he said (it was many years before I became a Hiro, and never to him), “No man can call himself so if he can't provide. Better to die, better to preserve your family's honor, your own honor, than to watch them suffer for you.”

So, as I stated at the beginning of this lengthy (too lengthy, I fear. I do not have Mai's talent for literature) tale, a gun sits in my lap, on top of my Final Notice, and honor requires that one man must die.

One of Mai's beloved authors once said “if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must go off in the third.” I always found that interesting. Much more so than Mai's usual pop fiction philosophers. In some ways, it melds the linguistic beauty of literature with the permanence of mathematics. I am well into my third act, I fear, and the gun only now introduced. But, as the author noted, it must go off.

Mr. Butler will be leaving the offices of Hanscom and Norris soon, to walk to his expensive Italian sports car and go wherever people like Mr. Butler go. He will find me there. The gun will go off. Will honor be better served by his death? Or mine? I do not know. Even now. But the curtain of this play will fall soon, and one of us will fall with it.

Farewell, Mai, my love. Farewell Shen, my joy. If you find no solace in my actions, at least find logic. Or trust me one final time, for one final accountancy.