if you trust your rebel heart, ride it into battle

Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi; Chen Qing Ling
Pairings/Characters: M/M; Song Lan | Song Zichen/Xiao Zingchen; Song Lan | Song Zichen, Xiao Xingchen
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 3,632 words
Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply, determinedly Taiwanese cuisine, Food Porn because the author inexplicably omitted that tag, racist microaggression (a character recounts getting renamed by his exchange host family.)
Creator Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, First Meetings, Taiwan, Street food, chinese diaspora feelings and food as love language, SongXiao Feast
Creator Links: (AO3) Irrelevancy; (Tumblr) touchmycoat
Theme: Food & Cooking, Cultural Differences, Fluff, Going Home, Identity, Modern AU, Slice of Life

Summary: Flirting and cultural reclamation via Taiwanese street food. Songxiao modern meet-cute.

Author’s Notes:
For the #songxiaofeast on twitter, thanks for organizing the event~!!!! There's so much great art in the hashtag *~* love me some food love....

Chinese glossary at end lolol, and is this all a shameless marketing ploy for Taiwan night markets? yes.

…The menu (a twitter thread w pictures) (Unfortunately no longer accessible—FMO.)

大腸包小腸 (dà cháng bāo xiǎo cháng): "little sausage wrapped around a big sausage" lol
蚵仔煎 (ó-à-tsiān): oyster pancake. I'm using the Taiwanese romanization here because it better captures that Hokkien pronunciation. Ningxia Night Market seriously has the best ones.
臭豆腐 (chò dò fǔ): stinky tofu!! I think it smells delicious; don't be like SL eat it normally without that crazy amount of sauce nkfsjdfds
肉圓麵線 (bà wán miàn xiàn): meatball & rice noodles. Two separate things but they're typically sold together. Meatball is always pronounced in Hokkien and sometimes rice noodle is too (mǐ suǎ)
豆花 (dòu huā): tofu pudding. It's not too sweet and it's sooooo refreshing to have on a hot taiwan evening with ice!
雞蛋糕 (jī dàn gāo): egg cake! They're seriously very good but a hit-or-miss from street vendors lmfao.

Drop a comment~! Happy feastings!!!!!!!

Reccer’s Notes: Taiwanese bartender Song Zichen, taking both pity on and a fancy to diasporic American tourist Xiao Xingchen, proceeds to initiate him into the ways of local street food (as both a welcome into his heritage and a courtship overture.) This fic, stuffed with delicious Unresolved Sexual Tension, serves as a reminder that the Sinosphere is a very big and diverse place, and brought an outpouring of nostalgic yearning for the Taste Of Home from diasporic commenters.

(And Ningxia Night Market needs to hire Irrelevancy as a publicist, dammit; I was fervently wishing my neighborhood had something like that up the alley!)

Fanwork links: Comfort Food / 有可能的夜晚 (AO3-locked.)