The Story of Edward Ng

When I was a child a man from Singapore came to live with my family. His name was Edward Ng, and he was so amazing he was barely human. For example, he knew a hundred ways to kill a man, and he could cook spicy meat balls with his mind. I grew up on Prince Edward Island, which is a small island in the North Atlantic ocean. I was orphaned by some Portuguese fishermen who threw me overboard as soon as I was born and raised on an iceberg by a family of walruses who had learned English not very well in Newfoundland. They loved me as one of their own, and so it broke their hearts when I decided to marry a polar bear at the age of six. Glambi left me for a writer from New York and I spent two years forlornly rowing those icy waters in a small boat made out of reindeer bones, never sleeping. At the end of two years a strange mist enveloped me; I fell into a deep slumber and woke up in Montague harbor, PEI, where my present family, the Manns, took me in.

At any rate, when I was in grade two and adjusting to my new home, this man Edward Ng (pronounced 'nuh guh'... no, I'm joking, it's pronounced 'ng'), who we always referred to by his full name, came to live with us. No one knows how or why he came, but strangely, we all behaved as though we knew him quite well. I was home-schooled at the time because I had learned the bad habit of quietly stalking my classmates for days before savagely mauling them on the playground. In the mornings I would watch Sesame Street, and in the afternoons my mom taught me how to build miniature replicas of famous sailing ships and recite long, epic poems. It was a brief and blissful idyll in my sad, tumultuous life.

Edward Ng fit right into our cozy routine. He never exited his den in the woodpile before two or three in the afternoon, and then our training would begin. Often he took me out to local cow pastures, where we would stand motionlessly for hours, absorbing the scene. On one occasion we went to Kentucky Fried Chicken and ate the very cartilage off of the chicken's bones. He taught me many things: how to wrap gifts, how to tame wild dogs, how to fabricate fish scales. He always refused to teach me any of his techniques for killing a person. Except for one.

Edward Ng had led an interesting life. He had been a famous and promising young movie director in Singapore when the government pressed him into military service. He joined the navy, and on his first mission the ship was overtaken by pirates. He told me many graphic stories of brutal violence from his time as a pirate slave, including filling men's bellies with water and jumping on them. Later the military retaliated and Edward Ng was mistaken for a pirate. The soldiers lined them all up and machine gunned them, but Edward Ng was smart and fell just ahead of the bullet, throwing himself under the man next to him. When they came by to bayonet everyone, they didn't see him, and he escaped in the night.

Edward Ng disappeared from our lives as mysteriously as he came. I remember my last moments with him, looking up at him and noticing the wind tousle his hair even as we were standing in the kitchen of our house. We were all there, feeling sleepy at the end of one of his many day-long feasts, with platter after platter of unimaginable asian cuisine and so many twinkly lights. He had been working feverishly for several hours in the corner while we gorged ourselves, and finally we saw what he had been working on: a human-size gingerbread igloo! He looked at us all one by one with his vast, timeless gaze, and then crawled inside. When I crawled in after him, no one was there. My family lived off of that igloo through all the famine of 1993. I don't know whatever became of Edward Ng. I heard he got married.