The Refugees

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Knowledge of this kind of ignorance leads to humility, and also to the awareness that what may seem useless, because it is not rewarded and recognized, might one day be of the greatest usefulness. Although this kind of seemingly useless work happens in the sciences, the burden of uselessness falls with greater weight on the arts and humanities in a world that increasingly values usefulness. When I became an English and ethnic studies double-major as an undergraduate twenty-seven years ago, I took a risk in studying things that a good number of people might think are useless. Perhaps my own parents, refugee shopkeepers who never went to college and who worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days nearly every day of the year, thought my studies to be useless. But to my parents’ credit, they suppressed any skepticism and supported my possibly useless studies. They were as ignorant as I was about my future, but they had faith in me. This is what I think so many of us who work in the arts and the humanities hope to receive from our universities, from our government, from sometimes skeptical students and their parents: patience and faith in us as we test the limits of our ignorance, as we pursue what may very well be useless, as we go in search of that mystery and intuition that exist within all of us.