Ping Asi (simplified: 平阿四, traditional: 平阿四, pinyin: Píng Āsì, jyutping: ping4 aa3 sei3), mocked as Scabby-Head Asi (癞痢头阿四, Làilìtóu Āsì), was the kitchen boy at the Ping’an Inn in a small town near Cangzhou. He saved the infant Hu Fei and raised him out of gratitude to Hu Yidao. In Side Story of the Flying Fox he goes by Ping Si (平四), and Hu Fei calls him Fourth Uncle Ping. He has no martial arts.
Biography
Hu Yidao’s kindness
Twenty-seven years before the events on Jade Brush Peak, Ping Asi’s father owed the local landowner Zhao five taels. Compound interest had swollen the debt to forty, and Zhao was forcing him to sell Ping’s mother as a concubine. Hu Yidao, staying at the inn on the day his son was born, found the boy crying by the stove. He gave him a hundred taels to clear the debt, and called him “little brother” when everyone else called him Scabby-Head Asi. Ping Asi came to love him like a parent (ch. 5).
One night Ping saw the bonesetter Yan Ji, later the monk Baoshu, eavesdropping on Hu Yidao and his wife. He also heard Hu Yidao give Yan Ji the three-part message for Miao Renfeng. On the eve of the final bout he watched Yan Ji smear poison on both men’s weapons, though he understood what he had seen only after Hu Yidao died (ch. 5).
Rescue of Hu Fei
After Hu Yidao’s death and Madam Hu’s suicide, Ping Asi ran to her room. Yan Ji was there, rifling Hu Yidao’s iron box, and had smothered the crying baby under a quilt. Ping clubbed him with a door bar and snatched up the child. When he pulled the fist and blade manual from the unconscious man’s grip, its first two pages tore off and stayed in Yan Ji’s hand.
Outside, Tian Guinong caught him and tried to take the child back. Ping bit his hand to the bone. Tian slashed his face, cut off his right arm and kicked him into the river. Ping held on to the baby with his remaining arm, and a boat pulled them out. He woke six days later, far from home, and never dared go back (FLY ch. 5; SIDE ch. 1).
Raising Hu Fei
Fearing that Miao Renfeng meant the child harm, Ping Asi took him to Du Ximeng on Jade Brush Peak, whose name was in Madam Hu’s letter. When Du, who coveted Hu Yidao’s martial arts manual, began searching Madam Hu’s keepsakes, Ping fled down the peak with the boy and the manual, leaving the keepsakes behind (ch. 10).
In Side Story of the Flying Fox the two travel as uncle and nephew, Ping Si and Ping Fei. Hu Fei taught himself from the incomplete manual. At the Shang Family Fort, in Miao Renfeng’s presence, Ping made Yan Ji hand back the two missing pages. He always told Hu Fei that the talk of Miao Renfeng murdering his father was untrue, and promised to tell him the whole story once he was grown. After they left the fort, Ping lived quietly in a remote village near Cangzhou on gold Hu Fei gave him, while Hu Fei travelled alone and seldom visited, for fear of leading Yan Ji to him (SIDE ch. 1–4, 8).
On Jade Brush Peak
Before Hu Fei’s appointment with Manor Master Du, Ping Asi slipped into the Du Family Manor disguised as a servant. There, clutching Miao Renfeng’s couplet as a pledge of safety that Miao Ruolan granted him, he exposed Baoshu as Yan Ji. He told the true story of Hu Yidao’s message and death, and of the rescue, and challenged Baoshu to show the scar where the door bar had struck him; Baoshu touched the back of his head and admitted it. He then announced that he had thrown all the manor’s food off the peak and blown up the rope that was the only way down, meaning to starve everyone there, Baoshu above all.
Cao Yunqi punched him until he coughed blood, and Yin Ji knocked him down. Miao Ruolan and Qiner hid him in the west wing, where Hu Fei found him and carried him down the peak (ch. 5–6).
Ping had also described to Hu Fei how Miao Renfeng fought Hu Yidao. On the cliff, that account let Hu Fei foresee Miao’s next move (ch. 10).
Personality
Ping Asi is fiercely grateful and loyal. Everything he did for Hu Fei he did for Hu Yidao’s sake. He remembered every word he overheard as a boy and understood it as he grew older, and on Jade Brush Peak he carries out a cold, calculated revenge, ready to die with his enemies.