I yearned to see people who looked like home, to be in a place I understood. But the people who looked at me saw an Indian, a foreigner.

I had traded in my standard T-shirt and khakis for nifty Indian garb: a calf-length shirt with slits up to my waist over baggy white cotton pants.

I may have been born in India, but as an international adoptee, I'm all American, at least mentally.

People don't see personality, though. They see skin. They see exotic clothes.

That moment at JFK, I realized I'm a permanent outsider. I won't ever completely fit in either in the U.S. or in India.

I inhabit what many adoptees refer to as the "third space" - somewhere between our internal identities as members of the white majority and external identities as members of a nonwhite ethnic group.

People assume I should have some memory, or at least knowledge, of my birth culture. They see a brown person, but I feel as white as my parents. I didn't grow up in a house where people ate chicken tikka, celebrated Diwali or wore saris. I grew up in a house where we ate spaghetti, celebrated Christmas and wore jeans.

Others try to peg me as a brown woman who is markedly different from themselves, perhaps Mexican, Navajo or Samoan. Few ever guess Indian, and even fewer guess I'm adopted, even after hearing my Utahn-accented voice.

Nearly every international adoptee faces the same paradox, and I've joined hundreds of other adoptees who want to inform others about our experiences.

"Adopted children are raised in white families and are afforded a lot of the privileges that come with being white in society. But at the same time, when they leave the sheltered environment of their home and town, the rest of society sees them as minorities," said Richard Lee, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota who has studied how adult international adoptees form their identities.

I have felt guilty and embarrassed about my lack of intimacy with the Indian culture. I've tried to deal with those emotions by visiting India, eating Indian food and trying to learn Hindi.

Other adoptees form their identities in completely different ways.

Hailey Bray, 31, was adopted from Seoul, Korea, when she was 4, and had to navigate her own third space as a Brigham Young University student.

She and her three biological siblings were adopted all at once into the same family and grew up in Burley, Idaho. They were the only ones of Korean ethnicity in the 7,000-person town that was predominantly caucasian.

Bray didn't feel drawn to try fitting in with other ethnically Korean students at BYU. While she served an LDS mission in Russia, two of her siblings went to Korea. They since have embraced their Korean heritage, but Bray, who visited when she was 23, still hovers around the edges of it.

"I think it is a unique, beautiful country and culture, just the same as I would think when visiting any other new country. I love the fact that my face is self-narrative of who I am and where I come from, but I don't feel drawn to embrace it merely for the fact that it is my obvious heritage." she said. "Although, I have to admit, it was a new and positive feeling to be in a place where people looked like me and I didn't stick out like a sore thumb.

My own visit to India awakened its culture in me.

I had the India Barbie and I enjoyed many of the patterns and colors of Indian decorations, but I had never really felt connected until my return in 2002. Others such as my childhood friends Marie West and Katie Pace, both of whom came over on the same plane from India as I did, never have identified as minorities, but rather as "white people with dark skin."

"We didn't have to waste our money on tanning beds," West joked.

The two are biological cousins, and have stayed close over the years, even living neareach other in Kaysville. Neither wants to return to their birth country.

"I don't think of myself as from India," said Pace, who is often mistaken for an African-American. "It's never a subconscious thought that I'm from India. I'm from Utah."

West, whose siblings are Indian, Caucasian, Latina and Colombian, has "never been treated as different." Having a built-in community as LDS Church members has made being accepted easier, they said, but they laugh about stories such as West's husband first thinking she was Saudi Arabian.

Lee has been studying diversity of experiences among international adoptees, and sees a new trend: For the first time, they're finding their own voices to express that diversity.

"In the past it tended to be the adoptive parents who were the voice, and that's really shifting now. More adopted adults are speaking out and advocating on behalf of adopted children," he said.

That's what the adoptee organization I belong to is focused on. Before last fall, I really hadn't met with other international adoptees to speak about our issues. But in November, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with 40 adoptees from nine countries who formed the International Adoptee Congress (IAC).

For the first time, I didn't have to explain where I was "really" from. None of us expected each other to know about our birth countries. Even though we'd had hugely different life experiences, the fact we all navigated the third space gave us something in common unique to adoptees.

Groups such as the IAC are popping up more frequently than ever, mostly because adoptees are getting older.

"Adopted persons are coming to that time in their lives when they're looking for networking with others," said Kevin Ost-Vollmers, an IAC board member. "There is a shared experience, regardless of your country of origin, and there are issues of loss of culture, of the potential relationships with birth family and grief that creates a commonality of experience."

While we did experience all of those feelings, we didn't agree on much else - not even on whether international adoption is positive - but we did agree it's time people know more about our life experiences.

The voices of adult adoptees have been "marginalized" by many in the adoption community, Ost-Vollmers said.

"Certain adopted persons have been incredibly loud and active, and some have been against adoption, or want open birth records, but no one wants to hear that," he said. "What adoption agency wants to see that some adopted persons are anti-adoption?"

That's why he became involved in the IAC - to let any adoptee share an opinion with the world.

"We are experts in our own experiences," he said.

What we know is that none of us fully fit in with our adoptive cultures or our birth cultures.

But we are excited to start an adoptee culture, one that allows us to pull the good from our cultures and create a space where we feel comfortable with each other and ourselves.

A culture where wearing a sari while eating a hamburger is not an affront to either of my cultures, one where I wear my Indian garb when I travel because it's more comfortable than my American clothes - both physically and mentally.

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* SHEENA MCFARLAND can be contacted at smcfarland@sltrib.com or 801-257-8619.

Additional resources

For more information about the

International Adoptee Congress, visit www.internationaladopteecongress.org.