Are You Hiding Your Anger?

They are tiny, cute, confused, and one of them, is very, very angry. They are five animated little girls and a gender-confused boy, all of whom spend their days encountering numerous injustices--anything from gross racial stereotyping to an obnoxiously self-involved mother for whom Oprah is God--in their tiny little world at AngryLittleGirls.com.

Created by 25-year-old Los Angeles actress and cartoonist Lela Lee, the Web site is a place where girls, socialized to suppress their anger, can let it all hang out, a place where Precious Moments meets “South Park.”

Lee conjured up the gang of kids to join Kim, a character she created and dubbed an “angry little Asian girl” in 1994 during a video-making class at UC Berkeley.

Lee, who grew up in a house where expressing anger was unacceptable, says Kim is her childhood alter ego, someone who can let loose with an angry torrent of cuss words whenever she is offended . . . and she is always offended.

“It started with this seed of ‘angry little Asian girl,’ ” Lee said. “I was afraid to show this cartoon to anyone because I was afraid it would be too angry. . . .”

In one early cartoon, an adult tells Kim that she speaks “good English,” to which she replies: “I was born here, you stupid dip____! Don’t you know anything about immigration? Read some history books, you stupid ignoramus!”

Later, she created a multiracial crew of buddies for Kim, and after graduating in 1996 with a degree in rhetoric, reworked them into a short film and sent it to an American Cinematheque film festival. She received good reviews and decided to make T-shirts featuring her grade-school heroine, smiling and sweet-faced, giving that universal sign for anger: the single-finger salute.

Tired of 3 a.m. phone calls for T-shirts, Lee launched the Web site (https://www.

angrylittlegirls.com) in November to handle requests.

But Lee, the youngest child of four who was in raised in San Dimas after her parents emigrated from Korea in 1974, and her alter ego are a study in contrasts.

Looking the picture of calm while eating a salad at Lulu’s Alibi in West Los Angeles, Lee says: “I was angry. I was the only Asian girl in my school, except for a Japanese boy, and I got teased so bad, so bad.

“I was kind of an aggressive child. Once my dad got called to school because I was a behavior problem, and then he noticed all the art on the wall I had done which showed I was upset. But you didn’t get angry in our house. If you got angry, you were a bad child. The cartoon is my therapy. I am not angry anymore, which sometimes disappoints people.”

Lee’s experience echoes what many psychologists say is a-nice-girls-

don’t-get-angry stereotype, which not only can hinder a girl’s emotional development, but also can create depressed, anger-impaired women.

Anger, said Mitch Messer, a Chicago-based therapist and director of the Anger Institute in Chicago, “is not feminine. Girls are taught to be pleasing, and anger, by definition, is unpleasing, which means that the child is sentenced to a lifetime of living her life on other people’s terms.”

Messer and other therapists advocate “managing anger and learning how to express it in a productive, effective way,” which excludes gouging out someone’s eyes and screeching obscenities. (OK for cartoon girls; unacceptable for their flesh-and-blood counterparts.)

“Girls get the message, ‘Don’t scream and shout,’ ” added Susan Heitler, a clinical psychologist in Denver. “There is more acceptance of boys expressing anger. Girls learn early on that venting anger is seldom a good thing.”

So what’s an angry little girl to do?

“We recommend an ancient technique called telling the truth,” said Messer, who runs anger management groups. “Which means we are free to tell someone, ‘It makes me angry when you . . .’ They will say something like, ‘No one makes you angry but yourself,’ and you say, ‘No, I had help.’ ”

Stay tuned to AngryLittleGirls.com. In the next episode: Kim visits the anger clinic.