Hector and the Search for Happiness Read Online Free PDF Page A

and she stopped smiling and looked a little sad.
    Hector was also sad, but he was still nice to Ying Li and gave her a kiss on the cheek when she left, leaving him her telephone number.
    He climbed back into bed and after a while he picked up his notebook. He thought for a moment then wrote:
    Lesson no. 5: Sometimes happiness is not knowing the whole story.

HECTOR IS UNHAPPY
    H ECTOR felt very out of sorts that morning. He left his hotel and decided to go and have coffee. He found a huge, very modern café where all they served was coffee, lots of different kinds of coffee. He’d already come across places like that with the same name in almost all the world’s big cities where he’d been to conferences, and so he knew how to order in that sort of café, except that this one was full of Chinese men and women talking or reading newspapers, and the waiters and waitresses were also Chinese.
    He sat near the window so that he could look out at the street (full of Chinese passers-by, as you’ve already guessed).
    He felt rather unhappy.
    But, in reality, being unhappy might also teach him something about happiness. At least it would prove useful for his trip. He began to think: why was he unhappy?
    Firstly because he had a headache due to all the wine Édouard had ordered. Hector wasn’t used to drinking so much.
    Secondly, he was unhappy because of Ying Li.
    Ying Li was a simple name, but the reasons why Hector was unhappy were quite complex. He didn’t really want to think about it, perhaps because those reasons weren’t so easy to accept. It even made him feel a little afraid. He knew this fear only too well, it was what stopped his patients from being able to really think about their problems, and it was his job to help them overcome this fear and really understand what was happening to them.
    Just then, the waitress came to ask if he wanted more coffee. She was young and quite pretty; she reminded him of Ying Li and he felt a pang.
    Hector opened his notebook and began to draw doodles. This helped him to think. (He would sometimes doodle when his patients kept him on the telephone for too long.)
    He was also unhappy because he felt bad when he thought of Clara. Of course she would never know what had happened with Ying Li, but even so he felt bad. On the other hand, if Clara had come with him to China, he would never have met Ying Li. When he was with Clara, Hector always behaved himself, and so he wouldn’t have got up to any mischief with Édouard, and so all this was partly Clara’s fault. After thinking that, he felt slightly less unhappy.
    But there was more. Hector was also unhappy because he hadn’t understood what was going on at all. He had thought that Ying Li had approached him because she’d found him interesting with his little notebook, and that later on she’d gone with him to the hotel because she’d found him more and more interesting. But of course that wasn’t the reason at all. Ying Li was doing her job, which she probably thought was less tedious than spending her life working like her sisters in one of Charles’s factories. When they were still at the bar and Ying Li was telling Hector about herself (of course now he realised that she hadn’t told him everything), she’d told him how much her sisters earned in a month: he’d worked out that it was half the price of the bottle of white wine Édouard had ordered, sparkling next to them in its ice bucket.
    Hector wasn’t sad because he’d discovered how Ying Li earned her living (in fact it did make him a little sad), but because the evening before he’d understood nothing. Or rather, he was sad because that morning he’d understood that he’d understood nothing, because while he still understood nothing he wasn’t sad at all, but now that he’d understood that he’d understood nothing he felt sad, if you follow. Realising that one has understood nothing is never pleasant, but for a psychiatrist it’s even worse.
    The pretty