When Veronica Jung, a Harvard-educated lawyer, glimpses a Manhattan greengrocer bent over, arranging flowers, she sees her father.

“To the day I die I won’t be able to pass by without getting moved by it,” said the 29-year-old Ms. Jung, stylish in a bright-pink camisole and a pair of earrings purchased on a recent language-study trip to Ecuador. “If you ever spoke to him, he could have the most sophisticated conversation about politics, but to the person on the street all he is is the guy wrapping flowers.”

Four months ago and with law school loans looming, Ms. Jung abandoned her lucrative job as a corporate attorney to become the first director – and the first paid staff member – of the grassroots Korean American League for Civic Action.

Despite putting in 70-plus-hour workweeks, Ms. Jung thrives in her new job. Her petite stature cannot mask her determination as she spearheads voter registration drives or mobilizes community support for a Sikh hate-crime victim.

Ms. Jung also finds herself in the familiar role of interpreter, a task she took on when she quickly learned English after arriving in America at age 8. “I’m in this work because people who can effectively translate our community’s needs are not common enough,” Ms. Jung said. “You either have people who haven’t lived the immigrant experience or people who can feel it in their skin but cannot effectively translate the experience.”

After law school and before starting a job with a large government contractor, she volunteered as a Red Cross interpreter at ground zero, helping Korean families who had lost children the same age as Ms. Jung during the attack on the World Trade Center. “It was the most emotionally devastating and trying experience of my life,” Ms. Jung said.

Accompanying Mayor Giuliani on the first family visit to the World Trade Center site, she recalled one Korean woman who demanded “how could you let this happen?” hitting the former mayor with flowers meant to be placed on the site.

“These are families pretty much like my own, who have sacrificed 25 years to make a life for their child,” Ms. Jung said. “Parents who usually would depend on their children to take care of documents. Those very children were gone. And so the translators, during that period, became surrogate children to those parents.”

Ms. Jung moved to Washington, D.C., that October, but her heart was still in New York. About a year later, she moved to Manhattan to join a smaller litigation firm and became active with KALCA. When the association expanded its services and offered her the executive di rector position this winter, she jumped at the opportunity.

Her mother encouraged her, saying, “This is the kind of job you were meant to do,” and told her not to worry about supporting her parents. But her father, speaking from the experience of a lifetime of struggle, cautioned her against taking the job. “You’ve done all this hard work you’re throwing away to lead this organization with limited resources,” he warned her.

Ms. Jung’s parents, part of a wave of Korean immigrants in the 1960s and ’70s, came to America when they realized they would not be able to pay for their two daughters to attend private school in Korea. Her first New York memory is a Queens motel room. “All night my sister and I were jumping up and down,” Ms Jung said of her first experience with a springy American mattress.

To learn English, Ms. Jung brought her dictionary everywhere and devoured books at the Steinway Street branch of the Queens library. Her determination and talent propelled her to Manhattan’s Hunter College High School and then to Harvard, where she studied social sciences. “Anxiety translated into really wanting to make it,” Ms. Jung said. “I knew that everything my parents were doing was for me. They had their dreams deferred even in Korea.”

While she flourished in school her parents ran two Queens delis. Her father would get up at 2 or 3 a.m. a few mornings a week to select produce at the Hunts Point market in the Bronx and both would work until 8 or 9 at night, at least six days a week. Ms. Jung joined them on weekends and when the shop got busy around holidays she would take her place ringing up sales, making fruit salad, and drawing signs.

Ms. Jung’s inclination toward advocacy began early, when she argued on behalf of her parents.When the roof leaked she would call the landlord, when a parent was sick talk to the doctors, and every document from government papers to the bills passed through her. “Even my own parent-teacher conference, I had to translate,” she said.

At Harvard, she became an outspoken Asian-American activist. But she also explored other immigrant experiences, writing an honors thesis on the challenges faced by non-English speakers in the New York court system. After graduating, Ms. Jung spent a year in Spain on a Harvard fellowship to study Korean immigrants there, and then returned to Boston for law school.

For Ms. Jung, financial success alone is inadequate. Korean-Americans must also achieve social equality. Experience, she said, has proven education and professional success is not enough for the community to achieve even standing in this country.”Asian-Americans are one of the groups that always suffer from the foreigner syndrome no matter how long we’ve been here,” she said.

But she is optimistic about the recent groundswell of Korean activism and Asian-American alliance building. “We must offset this idea we’re the passive group that doesn’t speak out when we’re denied rights.”