Madam Hu (simplified: 胡夫人, traditional: 胡夫人, pinyin: Hú Fūrén, jyutping: wu4 fu1 jan4) is the wife of Hu Yidao and the mother of Hu Fei in Jin Yong’s Flying Fox of the Snowy Mountain, and is remembered in Side Story of the Flying Fox. She is known only by her married title. A woman from Jiangnan, raised by her elder cousin Du Ximeng, she was young and very beautiful, and a far better fighter than her cousin (ch. 4, 5, 10). Her husband called her a heroine among women, and Miao Ruolan, repeating her father Miao Renfeng, says she carried herself more boldly than a man (ch. 4, 10).
Biography
Marriage
Du Ximeng, who had raised her from childhood, lived on Jade Brush Peak searching for Li Zicheng’s treasure. She noticed Hu Yidao lurking near the peak day after day, followed him into the treasure cave and fought him there. Each came to admire the other, and Hu asked her to marry him. She answered that if he took the treasure she would be wronging the cousin who raised her, so he must choose between her and it. He laughed that a hundred thousand treasures could not equal her, and sealed a written account of the choice in the cave (ch. 10). She had once kept him from going south to challenge Miao Renfeng, and later wished she had not, since he would then have fought with no one to fear for (ch. 4).
The journey south
Late in her pregnancy she grew homesick for Jiangnan, and Hu Yidao escorted her south. Men sent by the Miao, Fan and Tian families trailed them south, and near Tangguan Village Hu Yidao turned to confront them. One of them aimed a kick at her swollen belly. Hu wounded seven of them, and when he would have hurt more, she called from the carriage for him to stop and earn some merit for their unborn child; he laughed and snapped the dao he held (ch. 4, 5).
The Cangzhou inn
At the Ping’an Inn, in a small town near Cangzhou, the jolting road brought on her labour. With no midwife to be had, the bonesetter Yan Ji, later the monk Baoshu, delivered her son, and she gave him a gold ingot (ch. 4). That night Miao Renfeng came to the inn and left when the baby cried. Behind the partition she told her husband that she knew it was Miao and that his voice was shaking, and that if he feared for her and the child he would lose. She urged him to explain everything to Miao, and suggested the doctor as their messenger (ch. 4). According to Ping Asi, the message concerned three great matters: the secret behind the four families’ feud, how Miao’s father and Tian Guinong’s father had died, and Li Zicheng’s dao (ch. 5).
When Miao’s challenge came, she promised her weeping husband that if he fell she would not die but raise the boy, and would teach him to cut down corrupt officials and local tyrants as his father had. Hu gave her the iron box for their son’s sixteenth birthday (ch. 4). Ping Asi saw what it held: jewels, which she promised to sell little by little to keep herself and the child, giving up fighting and her light-fingered art of “empty-handed wonder” (空空妙手), and the manual of fist and bladework written by Hu Yidao’s great-great-grandfather, the Flying Fox, which the family rule passed to sons and nephews but never to daughters or wives. She promised not to read it and to let the boy read it himself once he could, and Hu put the box under her pillow (ch. 5). A few days before her husband’s death she tucked a bundle of keepsakes and a letter into her son’s swaddling, recording his birth date and hour, the family’s home, its ancestors and its living relatives (ch. 10).
The five-day duel
Through the duel she cooked feasts for the table, and on the first day she poured Miao a bowl of wine and toasted him as the only man under heaven who could match her husband. Guild Chief Fan warned Miao against her; Miao drank. She asked what unfinished business Miao would leave if he fell, and when he named Shang Jianming, who had killed his brothers, his sister and his brother’s wife, she knew him at once as a pupil of Wang Weiyang of the Eight Trigrams School and told Miao to leave the matter to them. Hu Yidao rode to Wuding that night and brought back Shang’s head (ch. 4).
On the second night twenty or thirty men gathered on the inn roof, shouting for Hu Yidao, who slept on. She took the baby in her left arm, leapt out of the window with a white silk ribbon in her right hand, and in the time of a meal snatched every man’s weapon with it and threw them all off the roof. Next morning she hung the weapons from the eaves, where they chimed in the wind. Tao Baisui was one of the men she threw down (ch. 4, 7). Miao, ashamed of his followers, thanked her for sparing them (ch. 4).
On the fourth day she saw what her husband, facing Miao, could not: before Lift the Jian, White Crane Spreads Its Wings (提撩剑白鹤舒翅), Miao’s back gave a faint shrug. She arranged to cough when she saw it, so that Hu could seize the initiative with the Eight Directions Hidden Dao Stance (八方藏刀式) (ch. 4). On the fifth day she gave the signal, and Hu Yidao had Miao at his mercy (ch. 4, 5). By Baoshu’s account, when Hu was reluctant she made the baby cry to remind him what the boy would lose (ch. 4).
Death
Miao Renfeng’s account, which Ping Asi and Tao Baisui both confirm, is this. Hu Yidao stepped back instead of striking and proposed that they exchange arts and weapons. Miao grazed his arm with a borrowed dao, and Hu died of the poison on it. Madam Hu put down the child, examined the dao and told Miao that neither man could have known it was poisoned, so no one was to blame. She had promised to raise the boy herself, she said, but after five days of seeing Miao’s heart, and since he had promised to care for the child, she would spare herself twenty years of grief. Then she cut her own throat (ch. 5, 7). Baoshu’s account, which Ping Asi exposes as a lie, has her husband take his own life after losing and her nursing the baby one last time and handing him to Miao before she dies beside her husband with the same words (ch. 4, 5).
Yan Ji took the iron box from under her pillow and was reading the manual when Ping Asi struck him down and carried off her son (ch. 5).
Remembered
Every year Miao Renfeng set up memorial tablets to his “sworn elder brother, Daxia Hu Yidao” and his “sworn sister-in-law, Madam Hu”, and drank before them for five nights (ch. 5; SIDE ch. 11). Nearly ten years on he had their tomb in the Cangzhou countryside repaired. After his marriage he took his bride Nan Lan to the grave, buried the Cold Moon Treasured Dao before it and laid out a feast as Madam Hu had once done for the two duellists. Drunk, he praised her devotion: “A woman like that, if her husband were in the water she would be in the water; if he were in the fire she would be in the fire.” Nan Lan, who had once fled a fire and left him in it, ran from him with her face in her hands, and the words opened a rift between them that never healed (SIDE ch. 2). Years later, at the same grave, Nan Lan tells Hu Fei that Miao admired no one in his life but Hu Yidao and his wife (SIDE ch. 20).
Ping Asi took her son to Du Ximeng, whose name he found in her letter, but fled the peak by night when Du began searching her keepsakes, leaving the bundle behind. Twenty-seven years later Du returns it to Hu Fei with nothing missing: baby clothes, a pair of baby shoes and the yellow cloth embroidered “He Who Has Fought All Under Heaven and Found No Equal” in which Miao had wrapped the infant. Miao Ruolan has already told Hu Fei she means to be like his mother and not her own, and he gives her the bundle as the most solemn betrothal gift he can offer (ch. 10).
Relationships
- Hu Yidao (Husband): He calls her “little sister”, and she calls him “Big Brother”; she dies with him.
- Hu Fei (Son): Born at the Cangzhou inn; orphaned at three days old.
- Du Ximeng (Cousin): Her elder cousin, who raised her; she married Hu Yidao on condition that he leave Du’s treasure alone.
- Miao Renfeng: Her husband’s opponent, whom she toasted and whose flaw she found; he mourned her as a sworn sister-in-law.
- Ping Asi: The inn’s kitchen boy, who saved her son.
- Baoshu (Yan Ji): The bonesetter who delivered her son and later robbed her.
Martial arts
Madam Hu is a better fighter than Du Ximeng, and Baoshu marvelled that so delicate a woman had such qinggong. With a white silk ribbon she disarms a whole roof of armed men while holding her baby. She has a quick eye for an opponent’s habits, and she speaks of her light-fingered “empty-handed wonder” (空空妙手), which she promises to give up (ch. 4, 5, 10).