Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross' The Longest Way to Eat a Melon

Reviewed by Salma Hussain

(Sarabande Books, 2025)

​The publisher’s elevator pitch for The Longest Way to Eat a Melon, by Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross reads that it is a “cheeky debut of short fictions exploring the pitfalls and minor triumphs of the creative process.”
 
This collection of short stories starts off with two epigraphs, one from Susan Sontag and the other from Mary Ruefle:

We know more than we can use. Look at all this stuff I’ve got in my head: rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc mam and Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms. —Susan Sontag, “Debriefing”
 
From this day forward all plants except the l̶e̶m̶o̶n̶  [melon] tree will be banished from my poems —Mary Ruefle, “Vow of Extinction”

If one knows the work of these prolific (creator & critic) writers, then one can guess at the vibes they’re in for in this smart, surrealist and sardonic compilation of experimental writing that follows a variety of (struggling) artists as they fumble through their impossible, absurd and inevitable attempts at art-making.
 
In Laura Moss’ review of Zong-Li Ross’ collection, Moss posits that the stories in The Longest Way to Eat a Melon are “[best] 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….You have to commit to sitting on the bench in front of the piece to take in the wonder….”
 
Apt metaphor and sound advice.
 
These are stories that at their core center on the difficulty of making art in a capitalistic world, and on the illusion of control and choice in the lives of such artists. Most stories end as they began: randomly and abruptly. Some stories take the form of lists, others consist of numbered paragraphs, and almost all make fantastical leaps in time and logic. This compilation is that rare, unwieldy thing: fiction on the craft of writing that is smart, dark, meta, funny, provocative and honest.
 
The first story, “A Woman Suffering”, sets the stage for the themes that are explored and dissected in this collection. The story follows a woman, Crisis of Faith, who quits her job and flies to an unnamed Meso-American “jungle” to get the “kind of sensual, process-driven, site-specific epiphany she was after.” Enter Crisis of Faith’s dilemma: “How was she to smell anything in this place, she thought aloud, atop the nauseating poverty and richness of so much feeling?” Comic and provocative in its honesty.
 
Crisis of Faith wonders/worries if the men around her are falling in love with her when clearly she has fallen for them. We learn of her internet-browser search: ‘woman + ruin,’ ‘how to ruin a woman emotionally,’ ‘how to destroy a man in bed,’ and ‘how feminism ruined my life.’ One can’t help but smile in wry recognition.
 
Eventually Crisis of Faith meets Folk Art and together they “capitalize on their divergent talents” by creating an American-style ‘tourist trap mecca’ for lovers of mosaic pottery, replete with American hamburgers and mosaic boutiques and awnings. On the eve of the project’s grand opening, Crisis of Faith and Folk Art celebrate and make love. Crisis of Faith bemoans that she has not yet experienced her spiritual/creative “transformation,” and Folk Art abruptly leaves her post-coitus because someone has located his missing dog, Beauty. Of course, she never sees Folk Art again. She is left to listen to the “hungry sound of stray dogs howling.” Not the sound of hungry dogs, but the hungry sound of dogs. My advice? Read all of Zong-Li Ross’ stories twice for full effect.
 
In “Dreaming Against Capitalism,” an artist lists the dental ailments “that pain her but she cannot afford to fix.” She laments the exorbitant price of art supplies and wonders if the only solution left to her is “to make art about the very conditions of lacking.” Indeed.
 
In another of my favourite stories, “A Journey, Some Riches, Some Castles, Some Garbage,” an actor and stagehand argue about what is accidental and what is intentional in art-making, and through them, we (readers) ask it ourselves. This story contains one of my favourite passages from this collection:

​“Death to theatre!” she found herself shouting, even though it was ridiculous, theater would never die, and when they continued to ignore her, she grabbed an empty wine bottle from the floor and threw it against the farthest wall. To her delight, the wall tore open like paper, because it was. She leaped triumphantly into the hole.
 
“Adieu!” she cried, diving headfirst into the tunnel behind it. When her exit went unnoticed, she came back in through the hole she’d made and tried it again. “Toodle-oo!” she said. Nothing.

Characters (and readers) come to realization that “effort + effort + effort = reward”* is a myth in the capitalist model, and yet they persist. This is what makes this collection both a lament against capitalism and a celebration of play and experimentation for its own sake. These pieces feel akin to the artist sticking out her tongue to the sham of industry, award and institution. There is a you-can’t-catch-me-you-can’t-pin-me-down-and-contain-me cheekiness, subversion and defiance to the writing.
 
We learn (under NOTES) that the title “The Longest Way to Eat a Melon” was loosely inspired by a quote from Lu Xun’s** 1936 essay, “This Too is Life,” in which he wrote, “If we ate and drank with long faces all the time, very soon we should have no appetite at all, and then what would become of our resistance? Still there are men who will talk in this strange way, who will not even let you eat a melon normally.”
 
Take your art seriously, wee artist, but yourself not at all, Lu Xun advised. Those who think of art-making with an end goal of clout or currency will soon be left with no appetite, neither for melons nor for resistance. These are stories that centre characters who eat melons with long faces and remind us to create with abandon, joy and experimentation, for this is the true subversion.
 
The Longest Way to Eat a Melon is for those who want to read writing that unsettles, startles, provokes; writing that eschews decorum and rules. In fact, these are not so much stories as they are ruminations on the beauty and absurdity, the tragedy and comedy of art, art-making and artists themselves.
 
Strange. Startling. Incandescent.

*A sentence/sentiment from this same story.
**Lu Xun was a leading figure in modern Chinese literature, he wrote in both vernacular and literary Chinese as a novelist, literary critic, essayist, poet, translator and political commentator. He was known for his satirical, acerbic tone and critical reflections on Chinese history and culture (Wikipedia).

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​Salma Hussain writes poetry and prose. Her fiction has recently appeared in The Humber Literary Review, The Temz Review, Queen’s Quarterly, The Ex-Puritan and Prism International. Her young adult novel, The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan, about a young girl’s immigration and menstruation journey, was published by Penguin Random House in 2022. It was selected for ALA’s Rise: A Feminist Book Project List and shortlisted for the Geoffrey Wilson Historical Fiction prize. A chapbook of her poems from Baseline Press releases this summer 2025. You can find her on Instagram: @salma_h_writes.