Exploring future research trajectories, this conclusion offers a methodological reflection by returning to the special issue's discursive point of departure, Singapore—the island-state that Wang Gungwu, historian of the Chinese overseas, has dubbed “the heart of Nanyang”— in order to contemplate its representational significance for wider Southeast Asia.1In Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua's award-winning film A Land Imagined, the character Wang Bicheng, a mainland Chinese migrant worker, takes Mindy, the attendant of the cybercafe he frequents, for a spin in his company truck. They end up going for a late-night swim in the sea. Afterward, while resting on the beach, Wang tells Mindy he has heard how the sand on which they lie comes from Malaysia, while other reclaimed areas of Singapore rely on sand from other Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, Indonesia, and Cambodia. Mindy then asks if they have left the island-state just by relaxing on the artificial beach, to which Wang responds, “Next time I can take you to other reclaimed areas . . . to see the world!” 改天帶你去別的填海地區看看 . . . 環游世界! The thought-provoking scene implies how Singapore embodies region- and world-making through the sand trade with its Southeast Asian neighbors. Located on Singapore's coastal peripheries, the land beneath the beaches—such as the one that the couple visited in the film—is both local and foreign. In this particular instance, when sand is displaced to a new locality, the identity of the resultant land becomes ambiguous and fungible.Alongside the occurrence of spatial aggregation, Singapore's situatedness in a larger geographical region can be grasped from another perspective: its equatorial location means that the island-state overlaps with the Doldrums (also known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone), a low-pressure area in which the trade winds from the northern and southern hemispheres collide, yielding a state of stillness that becalms maritime vessels. This peculiar climate phenomenon informs the making of Zone of Convergence, a series of artistic prints by Singaporean conceptual artist Charles Lim Yi Yong, whose work graces the cover of this special issue (figs. 1–3).Rendered in different shades of white and blue, Zone of Convergence consists of twenty-eight collagraph prints that share a cloud motif cast in varied shapes. Because of the choice of colors and the motif's protean forms, the prints also evoke images of ocean waves. The series came about from Lim's sailing expeditions along the east coast of Singapore over six months, during which he applied a method of “staggered observations.” The method involved taking note of the clouds and wave patterns at specific points and subsequently returning in time to register their changes. Out at sea, Lim's aim was to “see” the wind, the primary force of change in the weather system, whose invisibility requires him to draw upon senses beyond the visual—such as feeling and “tasting” the air—to fully experience its presence and “build a relationship” with it.”2Though the conceptual genesis of Zone of Convergence is tied to Singapore, the work, through its allusive links with the oceanic, conveys an expansive sense of Island Southeast Asia as well. Enacting Lim's idea and practice of spacing observations out over time, Zone of Convergence presents an intriguing tension between tranquility and turbulence that occasions a twofold interpretation. On the one hand, the clouds and waves in each print appear relatively static, reflective of their positionality in the windless Doldrums. On the other hand, when considered in seriality, they show sustained morphings due to the slow but invisible passage of time, which channel one's attention back to each print, enabling insights into how surface serenity can belie interior turmoil.By indexing the steady but no less dynamic transformation of mutually interacting ecological elements, the movement of sand, water, and air that receives artistic engagement in the aforementioned works resonates with this special issue's thematic focus on the Chinese-related social and literary worlds of Southeast Asia that are inhabited and/or produced by authors and different ethnic and language communities. As Carlos Rojas mentions in the introduction to this special issue, ecological elements figure prominently in modern Chinese intellectual and cultural thought. Recall also that in the most broad-ranging contribution to this collection of articles, David Der-wei Wang's reframing of Sinophone Southeast Asian literature in terms of a hua華 - yi夷 fungibility pivots on the translation of “-phone” as feng 風, the Chinese character for wind, whose metaphorical meanings encompass “sound, trend, propensity, and above all, poetic sounding and cultural articulation,” all of which connote a manifestation of and tendency toward change (bian 變). Building on how the seasonal monsoon that affects Southeast Asia “enacts maritime movements, bringing ethnicities, languages, beliefs, and customs into play with each other,” he takes a mesological perspective to position the wind/earth/water triad as the “symbolic repository” of Sinophone Nanyang/Southeast Asian literary and cultural humanities.Moving forward, just like its cinematic and art installation counterparts, Southeast Asian Chinese literature can be approached meaningfully as particular “zones of convergence.” By “convergence,” I refer to both the sense of coming from different directions to meet and mingle, as well as the sense of gradually changing to develop commonalities. Together, the two semantic layers open up Southeast Asian Chinese literary formations and related scholarship as discursive settings that host encounters, interfaces, and thresholds for generating novel perspectives on modern Chinese literary writings and studies.This project arose from an intent to focus on Southeast Asian Chinese literary production that registers different states of contingent confluence between mobility and place-making. True to its original spirit, the special issue eschews making general pronouncements on the essential Southeast Asian character of Chinese literary practices. Rather, the emphasis is on juxtaposing the diversities of the porous region not just by mapping common literary traits and tracking sociocultural processes, but also by assembling consensus and dissensus on approaches to studying its Chinese-inflected sociotextual worlds. The result has been a Southeast Asia that embodies and emphasizes the fluidity and hybridity of people and ideas, a regional configuration that corresponds broadly to current geopolitical borders, but also traces areas of historical and conceptual influences and connections.Echoing “a relational regional scholarship,” the identified convergences that create the Southeast Asia in this volume are both geographical and ideational.3 Besides surfacing less-noticed locational ties (Penang and Medan, East Malaysia and West Malaysia), a number of essays interpret the texts and contexts with an eye on styles of production in other places, such as China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, locales not immediately associated with the geopolitical region today; nonetheless, they are familiar nodes in the creative and scholarly networks of modern Chinese literature. Obviously, the special issue does not include all the varied areal constituents of current-day Southeast Asia, but it recognizes the need for more expansive coverage for substantive theorizations across the various place-based bodies of work. Aligned with this geoconceptual thrust, it devotes considerable attention to Chinese literary texts and practices related to Indonesia and the Philippines, the two prominently multi-islandic states in Southeast Asia that have been relatively understudied despite ongoing scholarly interest in archipelagic cultural thought. Though Malaysia remains the most conspicuous object of critical scrutiny—and representative of Southeast Asian Chinese literature, given how Mahua literature has remapped global Chinese literary production—the case studies of Indonesia and the Philippines can help inspire the field to reassess the typicality of the Malaysian case by studying its literary corpora in greater detail.Importantly, through analyses of scarcely acknowledged aspects of a writer (Stenberg), a forgotten literary tradition (Hoogervorst), and Anglophone creative expressions of ethnic Chinese (Lua), the historical and contemporary situations in Indonesia and the Philippines will inform future inquiries about how the internal diversities of nation-based literary polysystems in Southeast Asia are constituted differently. In addition, whereas some contributions evoke Chow Tse-Tsung's 周策縱 proposal to read Southeast Asian Chinese literature through his lens of “double tradition” (shuangchong chuantong 雙重傳統), which attends to influences from both China and the array of local cultural environments (Ng, Ko, Stenberg), others point toward alternative forms of “double traditions” that couple the local and the global (Lua, Bernards), while others call for examining lateral modalities of imbricated social and literary traditions that do not involve framing China as the fountainhead of Chinese cultural practices and phenomena (Hoogervorst, Chan).4Methodologically speaking, the special issue parses “localization” through different optics by treating the process as either one of absorption of foreign influence, or one engaged in adaptation to new cultural contexts. The articles gather emergent analytical parameters (gender, social class, minority ethnic groups); fresh conceptual conjunctures (the Sinophone and the xenophone, the huaxiaosheng 華校生 and the yimin 遺民, archipelagic imaginaries and oceanic epistemologies, resource extraction politics and labor history, the condition of semiwild and posthumanism); and less examined literary genres (popular literature, classical Chinese and Sino-Malay poetry, flash fiction, Philippine-Chinese speculative fiction). Together, the contributions demonstrate the diverse ways in which adopting a multiscalar Southeast Asian perspective can reorient us, those who study the regional literary formation, toward new routes of examining cultural pasts with lingering effects on the present, which forge fresh prospects for creative writing and scholarship.In assembling dispersed expertise on the subject, this special issue captures a precious Southeast Asian moment of modern Chinese literary studies. How can scholars in the field continue to harness the instructive potential of the open geographical region? Charles Lim's longitudinal practice of “staggered observations” inspires by drawing attention to the power of temporality. It would be ideal to develop, like Lim, an immersive, recursive, and accretive approach, engaging in what historian O. W. Wolters, in his discussion of literary inquiries in the context of Southeast Asia, describes as the process of “investigating the presence of connections, relationships, differences, disruptures, and instabilities mirrored in literature and also in the web of social and political happenings.”5 Mediated by the landscapes, seascapes, and windscapes, as well as the human and nonhuman environments, the texts and the milieus of their production constitute cultural zones in which the discernible and the not-yet-discernible changes intersect. In those zones of convergence, unexpected vectors of Chineseness or notions of interior alterity may flourish, attesting to the enduring conjugation of local self-understandings and extralocal perspectives of linguistic and ethnic relations to Southeast Asia.