Tracing the Currents Voyages, stories, and everything in Between.

Youth Signal connected two high schools: one in Vardø, in Arctic Norway, the other in Yilan, Taiwan. The students learnt about antennas, Morse code and call procedures, the grammar of radio. Then, under skies so thick with aurora that the signal had to fight its way through, they made contact, using old technology in a new era. The formal greetings lasted only a few minutes before giving way to "Do you listen to Taylor Swift?" and "What's your Instagram?" Since then, a box of Norwegian sweets has travelled south, pineapple cakes and Kuai Kuai crisps north, and handwritten QSL cards have crossed somewhere in between. The radio waves carried more than a signal. They carried a friendship.

As overseas executive producer for Taiwan Public Television's children's series Follow Me, Go! (下課花路米), Hsiang Hsiang Wang drew on a decade of local ties to open Norway to a film crew and three schoolkids: exchanges with Norwegian classrooms, off-grid camping on an island without electricity, pulling carrots in an Arctic greenhouse, herding reindeer with Sámi families and their drones, and sailing the Barents Sea for king crab. . Off camera, the kids drafted letters on A4 paper and handed out pineapple cakes from their backpacks ,gifts for friends they had just made, and might meet only once. No shared language, just synchronized laughter. Citizen diplomacy at its simplest, and its warmest.

The plan was leaf printing, until we discovered that the Arctic has no leaves in winter. So we improvised with the one thing Vardø never runs out of: mackerel. Then came the second surprise. Norwegian mackerel is silk-smooth, with barely a scale to be found. The workbench was built from supermarket cardboard. Children aged two to six inked the fish, pressed the paper and peeled it back, and every reveal drew a gasp. What they printed was, quietly, climate evidence. Mackerel never used to live in Arctic waters; warming seas pushed them into the Barents. The prints now hang in Vardø's community house: Arctic children, using an Asian technique, printing a sea that is changing.

In 1979, the Sámi artist Hans Ragnar Mathisen came to Taiwan for the first time. On Lanyu, Orchid Island, a young man named Shimanawan took him home, hosted him for weeks and rode him around the island on the back of a motorbike. Mathisen's maps have no borders, only rivers and mountains. The Sámi world never had them to begin with. In 2022, in a house in Norway, we opened a drawer full of a Taiwan from another era. So we carried it back across the sea. In 2023 the retrospective Sámi Culture | Taiwan Impressions opened in Taipei, and Mathisen, by then seventy-eight, returned to Lanyu to meet Shimanawan again at the end of the flying fish season. Indigenous youth from Taitung performed at the opening, Mathisen taught Sámi printmaking to schoolchildren, and joik singing carried across a Lanyu schoolyard. When he left, he took a Yami name with him: Shibiasonkunakum, a person with a kind heart.

Fish noodles are Matsu's answer to a world before refrigeration: surplus catch kneaded with starch, rolled thin, dried in the sun — an ocean preserved inside a noodle. On the Friday the Crossing Film Festival screened Taiwanese cinema in Vardø, we brought the craft north: fresh Barents cod worked into noodles the Matsu way, served in a soymilk seafood broth, lifted with Taiwan's mountain pepper, crowned with Langoustine. An Atlantic fish, a Pacific method. In one bowl, two islands traded their oldest ways of living with the sea. After the credits rolled, people may not remember the dialogue — but they remember the taste. Sometimes the shortest way into a culture is through a spoon.

In the summer of 2023 I invited four friends, from Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the United States, to Baosang Junior High in Taitung. The students fact-checked their geology books against real people: Irish history, polar nights, "Do people in the Arctic eat ice cream?" The questions drifted happily from geography to daily life, and at the end the children traded doodles from their notebooks, and their own imaginations of the world. The journey went beyond the classroom. There was a briefing on tourism strategy with the Penghu National Scenic Area Administration, a visit to local farmers supermarket, and a stop in Chishang, standing waist-deep in rice fields. Our friends brought their professions and took home the landscape. The children took home something else: the world isn't in a textbook. Sometimes it walks in and sits down in front of you.