Stories in the abstract
The Longest Way to Eat a Melon: Fictions
by Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross
Louisville: Sarabande Books, 2025
$29.50 / 9781956046410
Reviewed by Laura Moss
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About halfway through reading The Longest Way to Eat a Melon, I realized I had been approaching this collection of thirteen stories in the wrong way. I was trying to read it as a series of narratives and was a little bit frustrated by their discord. Instead, I saw, the stories were better approached as one would a gallery exhibition of abstract art. Thinking of the stories as verbal abstract paintings—with swatches of colour, ideas, images, and emotion intersected by lines of beauty and/or dissonance but with few elements of realism—helped me relinquish a need for order.
The pieces of Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross’ debut collection are populated by struggling artists (often failed) and are full of references to art, making, and resistance, and specifically to ceramics, painting, herbalism, poetry, and music. There are catalogue stories, meditations on intangible themes, and scaffolded tales. Others—dreamscapes and phantasmagorias—leave you unsettled. And I think that is the point. As a herbalist named Q says in “Tiger Balm,” “If I blend sense and nonsense, will it result in a more beautiful medicine?”
To read many of these stories you have to give yourself over to a series of meditations rather than looking for plot or characters to carry you through. You have to commit to sitting on the bench in front of the piece to take in the wonder. A narrator puts it this way,“Wasn’t he right, at least, about language being the most accessible kind of magic.” For magic to work, you can’t overthink it.
In the collection’s opening story, we are introduced to “A Woman Suffering from a Crisis of Faith,” known as “Crisis of Faith” for short. Not surprisingly, given her name, she quits her job in North America and heads to a jungle town to find spiritual awakening. And not surprisingly, a false awakening comes, and then goes: “But more importantly, this pattern of finding, then losing, the thing that might have brought her great happiness continued to be a philosophically troubling problem for her.” When faced with a truly life-changing experience (in the form of collaborating on a magic realism-sized “mosaic empire”), the character fails to recognize the actual transformation. The story stands as a satirical exemplum for the rest of the collection. Pay attention.
In “Dreaming Against Capitalism,” the narrator recounts their work history while meditating on their new position as a dreamer, sleeping all day to fight capitalism. The form of the story mimics a dream, where there are inconsistencies and jumps in scene that have to be willingly accepted. Leaping into a pond of sludge to counter capitalism is perhaps the scene that requires the longest time on the readerly bench.
“A Brief History of Feeling” traces the trajectory of emotions over ‘billennia,’ beginning with Ecstasy 500 billion years ago and leading to Attraction 2 billion years ago, when “two organisms kiss, and need no oxygen, none at all” to Regret yesterday. These are, for the most part, non-linear snippets of feeling intersecting across time in a decontextualized history. Flashes of colour on a wide blank background.
In the standout story of the collection, “Elementary Brioche,” Tian Fang is a young artist newly arrived in the Big City who turns to cutting hair at a university to survive. He approaches hair cutting “as he would any other artwork, fashioning on each student’s head the figure of a brave young bird breaking free from its mothers nest. Restless, tangled, full of potential.”
We are, however, told repeatedly that he is “bad” at his job. Tian Fang sees the world though art, “while he knows not what to expect of the X number of years otherwise known as the future, he imagines that it will be as beautiful as the best watercolor paintings, washing over him as gentle, undulating color and light.”
The story has 18 short chapters that follow Tian Fang in the Big City, where “the city’s mounting symphonic soundtrack blared triumphantly from an elsewhere-loudspeaker—at once everywhere and ostensibly nowhere at all—emptying the heroic streets of their burgeoning subplots and minor characters.” And nothing definitive happens to the protagonist, and that is enough.
The collection ends with a crescendo and a poof in the story of Han and Han, twins raised on opposite sides of the world who are gradually pulled together by a symphony of breath and sound: “Han & Han’s synchronized breaths quickened and the breath of the world quickened with them, the time between each inhale and exhale gradually shortening to the length of a single saxophone note.” “The Breath of Han and Han” provides a glorious finish to an enigmatic collection. From the abandoned mosaic world crafted by Crisis of Faith in the opening story to the acoustic world of the Hans’ dissolving potato and flute concerto in the final one, the collection is worth sitting with in abstraction.
[Editor’s note: There will be a soft launch for The Longest Way to Eat a Melon at the Vancouver Art Book Fair (at the Roundhouse) on July 5 following Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross‘ appearance on a 3pm panel.]
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Laura Moss lives in Vancouver and teaches at UBC. [Editor’s note: the above review is Laura’s first for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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