Teen runaway at center of ‘Miles from Nowhere’

  Nami Mun’s “Miles from Nowhere” is one of those books people will love or hate. The content is disturbing, depressing and sure to elicit an emotional response.
  Set in 1980s New York, the novel centers around a Korean-American teenager named Joon who finds shelter on the streets from her father’s alcoholism and her mother’s mental illness.
  Joon’s adultering dad abandons the family and her mom plummets into depression. Joon can think of nothing to do but find her father, a decision that ultimately leads her to leave as well.
  I understood ... the difference between getting lost and staying lost. I had left home to bring back my father, and when my search failed, I knew that meant that he wanted to stay gone. Which made me sad. And then jealous of his freedom. So I stayed gone, too, and left my mom to live alone, inside that tunnel of grief. I didn’t even go back to say goodbye.
  It doesn’t take long for Joon to realize the harsh realities of street life. She begins prostituting and shooting heroin. She does make some friends along the way — some more desperate than her, all of them swimming in their own sea of misery. Joon works as a dance hostess, a petty thief, an Avon lady, anything for money to get a fix and maybe find a bed. But some small part of her wants something better. A small seed of hope remains planted deep in her heart.
  I wanted to start over, too. I’d left a bed and a mother to sleep under storefront awnings right beside men who thought a homeless girl was a warm radiator they could put their hands to. I’d slept in shelters, in abandoned buildings. I’d been beaten. And at the start of every new day, I still believed I could choose my own beginning, one that was scrubbed clean of everything past.
  “Miles from Nowhere” is dark to say the least. But, sadly, the story is actual reality for some and rooted in the author's personal experience.
  Mun portrays Joon as sympathetic without glossing over the girl’s own responsibility for her fate. Though Joon’s life is sometimes tragic, she comes to see that you either can wallow or climb. And despite the guilt over leaving her mother, she begins to try.
  Some readers will be put off by the grimness of “Miles from Nowhere.” But inside its pages is a compassion for and understanding of the trials many runaways face, and many readers will at the least be able to relate to the ease Joon finds in leaving.