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A quest for understanding
 Christie
Aden’s grandmother had a saying: “You can’t understand
where you’re going unless you understand where you’ve
been.”
In some ways, Aden understood very well where she’d been. She
grew up in the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Thailand, and Belgium,
and, by the standards of diplomatic families, was relatively unsheltered.
“My mom was never very comfortable with us being the American
kids who stayed behind the gates,” says Aden, who joined a
local swim team in Costa Rica, studied piano with Belgian teachers,
and was allowed to take off for afternoons alone in Bangkok.
Nor was she sheltered from poverty. “Even now it’s really
difficult for me to throw away clothes and food. I’m really
part of the clean plate club,” she says.
But there was one thing she had never thought about, and it led
her to make a decision that some people found hard to understand.
“Coming back to the U.S., I was really naive about what it
meant to be a minority with a tradition of disadvantage,” Aden
recalls. “I had to look at the mirror and realize I was a black
woman in America—and what does that mean?”
So she decided to leave prestigious William and Mary College to
attend little Bennett College, a historically black women’s
college in Greensboro, N.C. It was, she says, one of the wisest
decisions she ever made.
“I learned so much. I’m so much better prepared for the
world,” she says. “It helped me to put my international
experience in perspective. Coming from overseas, you think that’s
all there is. But there is also racism, there’s bigotry, there’s
a cultural richness in being my ethnicity. I finally got to the
point of taking pride in all my background.”
After graduating (and marrying someone she met while at Bennett)
she moved to Washington and worked at the Holocaust Museum before
joining AU as scheduling coordinator for the university center.
Aden plans to go to graduate school—her husband teases her
that she talks so much, she ought to be a professor—but admits
she’s still torn between her many interests, from international
education to Jewish studies to history.
And she has another goal in her ongoing quest for knowledge: See
the United States. “I feel like I’ve been around the world,”
she says, “but I’ve never been around my own country.”
Next stop? Maybe the Rockies; maybe Disney World.
—SA
Photo
by Jeff Watts
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