Miles From Nowhere by Nami Mun

Arresting and unsettling, Nami Mun’s tale of a young immigrant runaway is animated by a dull pain that defies easy description. Joon-Mee is only twelve when her father abandons her family, a betrayal which will destroy her mother and force Joon to escape into crumbling, 1980s New York City. Ennobled by a fierce poetry tied to an unflinching gaze, Miles from Nowhere reads like a city street?blocks of flat utilitarian prose are suddenly illuminated by a burst of graffiti or an unexpected streetlamp.

There is much that is difficult and uncomfortable in Mun’s novel?drug addiction, prostitution, homelessness and the like?but strangely enough the novel begins with Joon’s friendship with a young runaway named Knowledge. Joon’s friend leads her in an ‘escape’ from their homeless shelter, though the shelter’s doors are always open and nobody stops their exit. Knowledge and Joon drift apart over the course of the novel, but it is Knowledge’s friendship and audacity which continue to guide Joon throughout her various wanderings. Her real adventures don’t begin until she follows Knowledge through a door that was never closed to begin with.

Despite their absence from Joon’s life at a young age, both parents play a strange and intoxicating role throughout the novel. Most of the information Joon has about her father is gleaned from phone conversations where she says nothing and her father thinks she’s an angry loan shark?she seems to never grow tired of hearing her father apologize and pretend he is talking to her. Yet Joon eventually understands that her father’s struggles are her own as well, particularly her ongoing battle with drugs. “The country was new and strange. It unanchored him. But the liquor was the same, and his habits were the same. He merely drifted towards things familiar?drinking, cheating?paths that never questioned who he was and why he was there.” But this revelation comes too late for Joon to avoid the same traps as her father, and too late for her mother to accommodate this strange new world.

Joon’s mother is decimated by her husband’s continuing infidelities, to the point where a young Joon begins finding her in catatonic arrest, motionless and silent, for hours at a time. After her husband’s departure, she orders Joon to pile all of his belongings in the front yard to be burned. With her mother kneeling half-naked before the flames, Joon realizes:

For the first time, I saw her clearly, as if I were inside a dream of hers, watching all her thoughts. She wasn’t putting on an act. She wasn’t being a nurse. She wasn’t being a mother or a wife or a good Christian. She was just dropping to her knees, inches from the fire, and sliding her thin arms into the flames. If I screamed I didn’t hear it, but I did pull her back, grabbing a fistful of her bathrobe, fully understanding that I was now playing a part in that dream.

It is this image that haunts the book, a needless and nightmarish fire that destroys the identities and beliefs people create for themselves and others.

Yet this absence of fixed identity is what ultimately gives the novel its strangely optimistic outlook. A first-generation immigrant on the run from imperfect parents, Joon changes her identity, occupation, friends, and circumstances as frequently as she chooses. Though not a classically linear climb from ‘bottom’ to ‘top,’ Joon’s wanderings are quintessentially American as she struggles to find a new and better place for herself. It is thus no accident that this novel, which began with following Knowledge, ends with Mr. McCommon, a name instantly and ironically American. A neighbor from Joon’s old abandoned home, Mr. McCommon remembers Joon and her family as troubled “just like everybody else,” while sobbing over his own wife’s betrayals. In these last moments of the novel, Joon realizes her own similarity to this man whom she once pitied and feared. This realization may be of little comfort to the reader but for Joon it is?and perhaps must be?enough.

Reviewed by Ben Platt

Miles From Nowhere by Nami Mun
Riverhead, 2008
Cloth, pp 304, $21.95
ISBN-10: 1594488541