Annotations
You stop going to bars so you don’t have to listen to people compare you to characters they assume you know.
You think of how it would break her heart to say you want to go home — and when you say home here, you mean China — because she spent her whole life running from it. You think of how when you lived in China, you thought of going home — and when you say home here, you mean America — daily.
She isn’t wrong; Chinese is your second language for good reason. But she isn’t right, either; the way people look at you is proof there is a hyphen attached to “American.”
Now, you feel resentful of the length of the hyphen — 21 hours and 6,700 miles.