Growing up on Long Island, where almost everyone around her was white, Lee-Ann Hanham would forget she had been adopted from South Korea. Really forget, she said, until she would pass a mirror.

"And you would stop and you would be surprised that, 'Oh my God, I'm not 5 foot 10, blond-haired and blue- eyed,' " Hanham recalls.

"It was difficult trying to seek out anything Asian outside the Chinese restaurants," she said. "I remember we did have Asian dolls, but there was no talking about it. It just kind of was."

For those surprised by her memory, Hanham said her experience was common among the estimated 150,000 Korean children adopted by American families in the five decades after the Korean War. Often isolated, in families that thought it best not to talk about adoption or race, many grew up feeling white in Asian skin.

Hanham has become well acquainted with the common experiences of those like her. Now 31 and living in Queens, she is the acting president of a New York-based group called Also-Known-As. Its members are adoptees, mostly from Korea, who have come together as adults to ease the way for younger children arriving from Korea, Vietnam and, these days especially, China. There, a parental preference for boys and a government policy limiting families to one or two children has resulted in thousands of girls being abandoned.

With 7,000 children coming from China each year, and adoptive parents wanting to do their best, Also-Known-As members have an audience eager for their knowledge — and craving their reassurance.

"We grow up," Hanham said, "and we should have a say in what has worked and what needs to be changed."

One big change already is that while Hanham remembers Korea being spoken of rarely, if at all, parents today are immersing their children in language classes, in play groups made up mostly of Chinese children with white parents and in celebrations of Asian holidays.

Support groups run the gamut. There are national organizations, like Families with Children from China, which has a chapter in Westchester County and the Bronx, and there are more local ones, like the Rockland County group for Jewish families who have adopted Asian children. At Also-Known-As, Hanham leads a mentoring program for younger adoptees.

"They will know other girls who are in the same boat, even if they all want to cry about it," said 46-year-old Nancy Kennon of Ossining, the coordinator for Westchester and the Bronx for Families with Children from China and the mother of 5-year-old adopted twins. "They won't be by themselves and their thoughts."

Also-Known-As was founded in 1996 by Hollee McGinnis, who was adopted from Korea and who grew up in Briarcliff Manor. She was not long out of college, curious about the experiences of adoptees like her and convinced they had something to offer.

"I never thought of Also-Known-As as a support group, because my perspective was that there was nothing necessarily that we had to support," said McGinnis, 33, the policy director at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in Manhattan. "We were whole people."

'Are you doing the right thing?'

In a world more open about adoption, parents themselves can talk more freely about their fears and anxieties. Debbie Vinecour Halperin, who with her husband, Scott, adopted 2-year-old Laci from China, worries that the little girl might one day reject them as parents. Will Laci grow up to wonder why they took her from China rather than helping her parents care for her, though in fact she had been abandoned?

And what do Chinese-Americans think when they see them together?

"Feelings like that," Vinecour Halperin, 41, said, "the guilt and stuff. Are you doing the right thing, taking a child away from their culture? But the truth is if you don't, they have horrible lives. She was in an orphanage."

Vinecour Halperin, who lives in Suffern, knows that one day she will have to confront the inevitable questions about why China allows its girls to be adopted overseas, but trusts she will be able to discuss it with her daughter.

"We'll talk about all that stuff," she said, "about the culture. It's not like years ago where people used to hide the fact that a kid was adopted. I guess you could still do that if you adopted in this country or from Russia, but it's obvious she's Chinese and I'm not."

The Halperins belong to the Jewish Far East Adoption Group, started by another Rockland couple, Mark and Sandi Jacobs, whose adopted daughter is 2-year-old Emma.

For the New Year, their home in Pomona was decorated with Chinese lanterns, and dinner was egg rolls and chicken with broccoli.

"We want them to identify early so they can have that core sense of the fact that they're Asian, as opposed to ... a different-looking person in a white family," said Jacobs, 40, a computer software developer who works from home. At the same time, he does not want to lose sight of Emma's personality.

"If you're raising a kid that's a happy-go-lucky kid, that kid will probably thrive in any atmosphere," Jacobs said. "If you have a kid who's more of a thinker, who knows? It depends. My 2-year-old ... who knows what she's going to do? She's the most happy-go-lucky kid now, but who knows what's going to happen when she faces these crises."

Confronting racism

In her talks, McGinnis frequently focuses on stereotypes about Asians and racism many parents likely have not experienced. She tells parents to expect their children to encounter some discrimination and not to be surprised if they hide it. The children might not want to hurt their parents, she said, an impulse confirmed in a survey of adult Korean adoptees.

Amanda Baden, a Manhattan psychologist who specializes in transracial adoption, said parents may not know what to say about racism and discrimination, but more and more, they recognize it can happen. She herself was adopted from Hong Kong and raised in a white family.

"It pains them a lot because they also know that they're not quite clear on what it feels to have that same kind of experience," she said. "And of course they always want to protect their kids from it, which they can't really do."

McGinnis said that as the youngest in her family — she followed two older brothers who were not adopted — she experienced little teasing growing up in Briarcliff. That was not the case for Joy Lieberthal-Rho, who was adopted at age 6 and who lived in Mount Vernon, then Briarcliff, before moving to Dutchess County.

Throughout her childhood, she said, she tried hard to blot Korea out of her mind. She desperately wanted to remain in the United States, and according to the logic of her young mind, rejecting the country and language of her birth would ensure she would stay.

"If I forgot Korean, then that would mean I would never have to go back," she said. "I wanted to be as American as possible. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to walk and talk and look like everybody else."

But Lieberthal-Rho would never look like her blond-haired, blue-eyed mother, and after she left home for college, without her family as a buffer, she began wrestling with who she was. Even if she did not think of herself as Asian, everyone around her did, she said.

So she embraced her Koreanness, dating Korean men and befriending other Asians. She went to live in Korea, learning the language, even staying at the orphanage she had been placed in as a child, until she decided she did not fully fit in there, either.

"Just because I wanted to identify myself as Korean, I realized I didn't believe in all of the things that other Korean people did,'' she said. It was then that Lieberthal-Rho understood that she could be both.

'How do we explain to our daughters?'

She and McGinnis crossed paths again as McGinnis was founding Also-Known-As, and Lieberthal-Rho has been involved from the start. She is now 34, married to a Korean-American and lives in New York City. She works in the post-adoption department of the Spence-Chapin agency, where her once informal talks to prospective parents have become mandatory discussions. Most want to know about her upbringing — what had worked, what had been missing.

"How do we explain to our daughters the one-child policy in China?" parents ask her, she said. "How do we explain to our daughters that they may never see their birth parents again in their life? Instead of using the word abandoned, what should we use? ... How do we incorporate culture into our families? Is it important to incorporate culture? Are language lessons necessary? So these are all the questions that I was getting over the years."

The older adoptees say the push to explore culture is a good idea but caution parents to listen to their children. There might be times when they will want nothing to do with their heritage.

"It's a complicated question because I think we all have different perspectives," Baden said. "I think some people will say they really felt they wanted a strong, strong link to their culture and some people will say they didn't need that link. It varies a lot."

If parents already face pressure to be the perfect parent, it is even more intense for adoptive parents, McGinnis said. Do they shuttle their children between Chinese dance and tae kwon do for their children, or to prove themselves supermoms, she asked.

Not all problems are the result of adoption, Hanham cautions. Some may simply be the ups and downs of adolescence.

As the Chinese girls grow older, they will face one big difference from the early Korean adoptees. Most will never be able to search for their biological parents, said Pamela Thomas of Congers, the director of the China program for the Brightside for Families and Children adoption agency in West Springfield, Mass.

"Our children from China have been found abandoned anonymously, but a number of Korean adoptees are able to go back and search and reunite with their birth family," said Thomas, whose daughter, now 10, wasamong the first wave of adoptees from China.

"They may choose not to, but they have the opportunity very often to do that, and our children from China don't. And so the challenge in parenting these children is to help them understand that they can be whole even with a big part of the puzzle missing."

The parents will one day know how well they've done, she said.

"Our children will tell us."

Korean Adoptees on Ethnicity, Discrimination, Birth Families, Friends

Six years ago, several Korean adoptees who are now adults participated in a study about their perceptions of international adoption. The study was was done by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, in conjunction with Holt International Children's Services.

Here are some of the findings

• Some adoptees described having no clear sense of ethnicity growing up, offering such comments as, "I felt different and alienated and alone," and "A freak — I tried not to think about it." As adults, nearly as many described themselves as Caucasian as Asian/Korean — 11 percent to 14 percent. Most, 64 percent, put themselves into the category of Korean-American/European.

• More than half said they had taken advantage of opportunities to explore their Korean heritage while growing up, from attending camps dedicated to Korean culture to Korean food, Korean churches or traveling to Korea. Others explained why they had not — "I refused because I was trying to fit in." A larger number reported exploring their heritage as adults, 74 percent.

• Some younger adoptees born in the late 1970s thought that there was too much attention to Korean culture, "that the pendulum had swung too far to the other extreme" compared to the earlier years in which culture was ignored.

• The majority said they had experienced some discrimination while they were growing up, with race cited far more often than adoption as the reason. Many reported hiding the discrimination from their parents.

• Slightly less than a quarter had searched or were searching for their birth families, and another third said they were interested in searching but had done nothing yet. By contrast another third said they had no interest in searching. Fifteen percent were unsure.

• As far as social relationships, a little more than half included Asians among their friends, close to a quarter had only Caucasian friends and one person reported having only Asian friends. Fifteen percent said they dated more Asians in college than in high school.