Mary Anne Foo's parents taught her to be a political activist because they suffered the sting of discrimination.

Her father worked in a grocery after college because, in the 1950s, Chinese-Americans couldn't get government jobs in his hometown of Marysville, where his family had lived since the 1860s.

Foo's mother spent three years during World War II in a Colorado internment camp for Japanese-Americans.

Foo suffered her share of indignities growing up in Marysville, a farm town north of Sacramento.

While other kids played, Foo's parents ordered her to write reports about civil-rights heroes. While other girls carried pink Barbie lunch boxes to school, Foo was teased for using a politically correct green "ecology" box. While other children watched television, Foo's parents took her to meetings at City Hall.

"I've been going to meetings since I was 5," Foo said. "My parents wanted me to know that children have a voice."

Foo made a career out of those lessons. In 1997, she co- founded the Orange County Asian Pacific Islander Community Alliance, an advocacy group for health, social and economic issues.

Her leadership of a diverse and fragmented community - Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Samoan, among other groups - led to her recognition as Woman of the Year by Assemblyman Lou Correa, D- Anaheim.

Foo, 36, is decades younger than most other women of the year honored Monday by the Assembly in Sacramento. But she does not come across as a woman in a hurry. Staff members at OCAPICA's Garden Grove office describe her as a patient, motherly figure, a consensus builder, and an inveterate matchmaker with a low batting average.

"Her success rate is zero," said Susan Lee, a staff member who is still single.

Foo is better at getting people together for unromantic causes, like panel discussions about hate crimes.

"You can't say no to her, because she's always smiling and nice," said Anne Lee, OCAPICA's associate director. "In a quiet way, she's very powerful."

Diep Tran, coordinator of two OCAPICA education and health projects, compared her boss to a popular Japanese animated character, Tenchi, a royal-blooded warrior who overcomes villains by making peace, not war.

"He gets enemies to get along with each other," Tran said.

Foo took the compliment with self-deprecating humor.

"I thought you were going to call me the guy from Pokemon," she said, "the little yellow fat dude." It's not easy building a community of Asians and Pacific Islanders. Koreans, Filipinos, Hmong, Vietnamese, Chinese and Samoans don't look alike. They speak different languages, worship different religions and often have ancient enmities in their ancestral homelands.

Foo seeks out common ground: language barriers, immigration history, health problems, prejudice. Her mantra is strength in numbers. Together, Asians and Pacific Islanders constitute 14 percent of Orange County's population. Like her job, Foo's family is a multicultural experience. Her husband, Eduardo Tsuneshige, is a Peruvian native of Japanese ancestry who works as a car mechanic and speaks Spanish as a first language. Their son, Matthew Francisco Foo Tsuneshige, adores Barney and speaks a mix of English, Spanish and Japanese that Foo calls "Spanglishnese." Foo's troubles as a working mom seeking child care increased her sympathy for the needs of her constituents. She worries that state budget cuts for health care and other services will cause more suffering. But fund raising has been a measure of Foo's success. OCAPICA now has a full-time staff of nine and a $580,000 budget - mostly government and private grants, including part of a $4 million grant to fight cervical cancer, a disproportionate killer of Asian women.

Foo's formula for persuasive grant applications is simple: "Tell a community story."

Learning those stories takes her from meeting to meeting - with politicians, government officials, educators, donors, activists. Once again, her parents' training comes in handy.

But there's one parental lesson she hasn't learned: cleaning up her room. Her office is strewn with gym clothes, half- read People magazines and teetering stacks of papers.

"I don't know how to file," she confessed.