General | 9/28/2016 11:00:00 AM

The following feature originally appeared in the football game program on Sept. 24, 2016.
The world is a huge place.  It has 24 time zones.

Its circumference is roughly 24,860 miles, or about 691 round trips from the Wayne State University to oh, say, Birmingham, Mich. in Oakland County.

Its area is 197 million square miles. You could put 1,377,622 Detroit-sized cities in the world. Think about that never-ending traffic jam.

It's made up of 195 countries– or 196, if you count Taiwan, which many people don't. Most people have probably never heard of a good number of those countries, such as Benin, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Eritrea, Gabon, Holy See, Kiribati, Mauritania, Mayotte, Montserrat, Nauru, Niue, Reunion Island, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Seychelles, Tokelau and Vanuatu.

If you're now more convinced than ever that the world is bigger than you could have imagined, then put yourself in the mindset of a child, for whom going two streets over to a friend's house to play with friends is a long trip, and going into the next county to visit grandparents is a major excursion. Indeed, they see the world through their own kid-sized prism, with each step the equivalent of a couple of country miles. And that's understandable.

Then there's WSU women's senior tennis player Ashley Walker. For almost as long as she can ever remember – going all the way back to her grade-school days -- the world has never been this monstrous entity with all these faraway places. It has been close and compact. The rest of the world's countries have always seemed to be no further away than just over the horizon. And the way she has viewed it, when you get there, it's not a strange place at all, but rather warm, comfortable, cozy, welcoming and inviting.

Growing up in Canton, Mich., about 30 miles west of Detroit, her dreams were, at first, very nothing out of the ordinary.

"In my earliest memories, I wanted to be a neurosurgeon," said Walker, who turned 21 just days ago.

That made sense. Who doesn't want to help sick people get better? That's a noble desire. It takes a lot of schooling to be a neurosurgeon, but that didn't dissuade her. Even at that age, she knew she was smart enough -- and determined enough – to handle it.

But then something happened.

Her goals changed – drastically.

"When I got to be 11, I decided I wanted to go to Japan and be a translator," she said.

Say what?

"I don't know how and why I became interested in that, but I did," she said with a laugh. "Neither of my parents had any connection to Japan, and I didn't have anyone else in my extended family, or even anyone I knew, who had a connection over there. I had absolutely zero background in Japan.

"So I don't know where I got it from. But what I did know right away is that I liked it, and I've been interested in it ever since."

There are two ways that parents can react to something like that from their grade-schooler. They can put a stop to it immediately by saying that it's too far-fetched -- too way out in left field – and then try to talk her back into wanting to be a neurosurgeon, an attorney, a dentist or something a little more mainstream. Or they can just kind of laugh it off and hope it fades quietly into the sunset, while at the same time not pooh-poohing it and completely squashing their daughter's aspirations, unique though they may be.

Walker's parents, Clarence and Sherry Walker, chose the latter route.

"They just told me, 'As long as you can make money doing it,' " Walker said. "They didn't want me to end up poor and destitute."

So Walker set about learning all she could about Japan – its culture, history, customs, food, weather and, of course, its language. She was a sponge, soaking every drop of information she could find. And the more she got, the more she wanted.

By the time she entered Salem High School in Canton, she was more determined than ever to get where she eventually wanted to go. The school didn't offer Japanese as a language course of study, but it did have Chinese, and she signed up for it.

"I liked it. I really did," she said. "Chinese is actually very similar to English grammatically, so that helped me learn it and speak it."

But as much as she enjoyed the experience – and as much as the Chinese language is a good one to know and, especially, master, because of the opportunities it presents in the global marketplace as the country's economy continues to grow – it didn't quite hit the target as squarely with her as did Japanese.
 

"Japanese is a hard language to learn because it is so very much different from English,"  Walker said. "And it is not in as much demand as Chinese in terms of finding a job and its place internationally, but there's just something about that I really like."

So with her affection for Japanese, and her comfort with Chinese, it only made sense, then, that she would choose Asian Studies (Japanese and

Chinese) as a joint major when she got to Wayne State. She enhanced that several years ago when she took a three-week trip to rural China to teach English.

"I liked it," Walker said.

But not nearly as much as the trip she made this summer. Leaving in mid-May, right after the end of the spring semester of her junior year, and not returning until the first part of August, she spent about 2½ months in Japan on an internship teaching English to Japanese students of all ages, from adults all the way down to those in elementary schools.

We can all remember back to our college days, or simply to our days as young adults, when we first discover our niche – or at least what we think is our niche – and the unbridled joy we feel. That moment came for Walker on this trip to Japan. She already knew that working as a translator in that country was what she really wanted to do – her heart told her so in no uncertain terms – but this cemented it.

"It was a dream come true. I flat-out loved it," Walker said. "It was so much fun. The people were so friendly, and when you go somewhere new, that makes all the difference in the world. It makes you feel welcome.

"To me, Japan was a lot more accessible to foreigners than China. I learned to find my way around. Whenever I needed something – when I was in the grocery store and couldn't find what I was looking for, or when I didn't know how much I owed when I got to the checkout – the people were more than happy to help me."

Back home now, Walker is in school and playing tennis. With her ability to make the world a lot smaller than it might appear to others, the young lady from Canton, Mich. just got done with a weekend match against Walsh University, located just outside Canton, Ohio. Not surprising, really.

Walker says that when she was in high school, where she was a four-year letterwinner in tennis and compiled a 58-7 record in her final three seasons for the Rocks, she wanted to get out as soon as she could so as to enable her to go off to college and begin working more closely toward her goal. Now that she's ending her time in college – she hopes to graduate next spring – she is anxious again to move on and get so close to that goal that she can actually touch it.

"I'm not sure what's out there, but I'm really anxious to find out," she said. "When I was over in Japan, I felt like it was another home. I met so many great people. I'd like to go back there and see them again."

Since, at least to her, it's a small world after all, Ashley Walker probably will get her wish.

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