Examining Ha Jin’s novels, especially those on contemporary Chinese American experiences in the crossfires of US-China competition, this article proposes post/Cold War entanglements as a critical frame for reconsidering Asian American studies today, and argues that attention to Chineseness as a political, rather than cultural, construct is more urgent than ever. Focusing on Ha Jin’s immigrant novels and what they mean to Asian American studies, this article seeks to explain how Cold War politics works on and through Chinese Americans to render a more complex picture of post/Cold War transpacific imagination. His diasporic rearticulation of Chineseness and the principle of independence in the era of Global China encourages us to reassess the meanings of identity politics and reconsider the globality of Chinese American writing as a critique of totalitarianism.