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Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun
Nami Mun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up there and in the Bronx, New York. She has worked as a door-to-door Avon Lady, a dance hostess, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a bartender, and a criminal investigator. A graduate of University of California at Berkeley, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she garnered a Hopwood Award for fiction and the Farrar Prize. She has received a Pushcart Prize, as well as scholarships and residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her stories have been published in the 2007 Pushcart Prize anthology, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Evergreen Review, Witness, and other journals.
This novel takes the listener down the mean streets of New York City but the scene could well be in any large urban area in the United States. It is an explicit, realistic look at the life of a teen-age runaway who must fend for herself in an unforgiving environment. Some will find it too shocking but every teen-ager who contemplates running away from home should listen to it.
The main character is Joon, a sixteen year old Korean immigrant who ran away from home in the Bronx when she was twelve. Her two current friends, Knowledge, a seventeen year old African-American lesbian drug dealer, and Wink, a white male prostitute of about the same age, meet in a shelter for the homeless. Like many runaways, they leave the shelter together but soon drift apart. Starting with a series of flashbacks, the listener learns about Joon's dysfunctional family. Her father, a philanderer who constantly fought with her mentally ill mother when he was home, deserted the family and Joon. Joon unable/unwilling to care for her mother, left soon after. From there, the story becomes a series of episodes as Joon sinks into a world of sex, drugs, and survival. The time frame becomes sketchy and often it is difficult to determine her age. For a while she supports herself by selling newspapers to commuters. Later, she works as a dance hall hostess. Other jobs include selling Avon products and as an aide at a nursing home. Over the years she had many different sex partners, an abortion, a heroin addict boy friend. The story is told in the first person and the reader, Ali Ahn, becomes Joon, the main character. She captures the voice of a naive adolescent who maintains an optimistic outlook on the future. She is also so convincing that listeners will forget that the story is fiction. Anyone who is offended by liberal use of the F--- word, graphic scenes of sexual activity that includes attempted rape and oral sex, and other forms of socially unacceptable behavior would be uncomfortable with this novel.
Mun, Nami. Miles from nowhere. Read by Ali Ahn. 6 CDs. 6.25 hrs. Recorded Books 2009. 978-1-4361-7832-7. $72.75. Vinyl binder; content notes. SA
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