Joseph Han’s 2022 novel Nuclear Family interrogates the constructed nature and material permanence of militarized borders by imagining the DMZ border between North and South Korea as a physical barrier that extends beyond death. When Korean American expat Jacob is possessed by his grandfather’s ghost in South Korea, his attempt to cross the DMZ has profound implications for his family in Hawaiʻi and for the geopolitical relationship between nation states. This roundtable gathers scholars of Asian American studies to engage in a conversation with the author about the significance of Nuclear Family for Asian American studies scholarship and teaching. We ask: how does the novel’s exploration of what Grace Cho terms “hauntings of the Korean diaspora” demonstrate war’s capacity to exceed temporal and geographic boundaries, exerting a material and affective force in present-day diasporic experiences? What can we learn from the novel’s place-based navigation of immigrant relations in Hawaiʻi and how settler colonialism in the Pacific is inflected by compounding U.S. militarism in the Pacific and Asia? Finally, thinking toward the novel’s pedagogical use, we ask how we can incorporate Nuclear Family into our classroom teaching - how might it both supplement and expand the already rich body of Asian American literature on war and diaspora?