A man with a gentle expression and slight smile approached from down the sidewalk in front of the nonprofit APANO
(Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon) officeon SE Division Street. Holding his hand, his young daughter danced by his side. Cayle Tern was arriving to be photographed and to talk about his life for this feature profile in The Immigrant Story project, recounting his life as a Laotian refugee coming to the U.S., ending up in Portland and playing a significant role as an advocate for the Oregon Southeast Asian immigrant community.
Tragically, instead of this article being a snapshot in the middle of a compassionate and productive life, it is also a tribute in memoriam to a loving, hard-working man who lived his life in the service of others.
Cayle Tern died suddenly on May 7, 2026, of a heart attack. He was 49 years old.
Tern was born to Lu Mien parents in 1977 shortly after the Laotian civil war, “somewhere between my mom being in the communist re-education center in Laos and fleeing to the refugee camp in Thailand,” Tern said. “There is a birth certificate handwritten in Chinese that says I was born in 1977 in the Thai camp, but this may be exactly true or may not be. My Mien name is Dangc Gaub Chiang. Dangc is our clan name and is my last name, Gaub is the birthplace of my family and I was given that name because I was the first born, and Chiang is my father’s family name,” he explained. Dangc was changed to Tern in the US to make it easier to pronounce and spell for Americans.
“Due to the war trauma my family doesn’t talk in detail about the past, so I am missing pieces, but I know our people – the Mien people – originated from China, where they were a recognized ethnic minority. So my grandparents and my parents were from China,” Tern continued. “They were country people. They lived off the land in rural areas as farmers and they raised cattle.” Because of the Chinese oppression of ethnic minorities, the Mien communities fled from their homes in Northern China into Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. His family ended up in the mountains of Laos, where they set up their farming communities, sometime before the Vietnam War.
Tern said he was distressed that Americans know so little about the complex involvement and painful history of the Laotian Mien and Hmong communities with the American CIA, during the Vietnam War and Laotian Civil War in the 1960s and 1970s. His uncles were heavily involved in this fighting, greatly impacting his family’s post war life. In an official document posted on its website (https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/studies-in-intelligence-winter-1999-2000/cia-air-operations-in-laos-1955-1974/), the CIA itself describes its activities there as “The largest paramilitary operations ever undertaken by CIA up to this writing… For more than 13 years, the Agency directed native forces that fought major North Vietnamese units to a standstill.”
While the communist Pathet Lao waged war with the Royal Lao government, the Vietnam War was raging between the communist North Vietnamese and South Vietnam. Laos became the covert center of what has been named the “proxy war” or “secret war” between the Cold War Superpowers.The North Vietnamese, collaborating with the communist Pathet Lao, invaded Laos and occupied the east, turning it into their Ho Chi Minh trail, a military supply corridor transporting arms and soldiers for the war with South Vietnam. The U.S. trained many Mien and Hmong tribesmen to disrupt these operations, the Mien motivated by the hope of thwarting the communist takeover of their land in Laos.
“My three uncles were generals in the special guerrilla unit of Mien working with the CIA. And my father was a 15-year-old soldier. There were lots of teenage soldiers. So when the war ended and the monarchy fell, they had to flee. One of my uncles fled to France, another to Canada, and one died,” Tern said.
The war also left much Laotian land unusable, contaminated with agent orange and unexploded ordnances from the US bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Agent orange was a potent herbicide and defoliant used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Between 1961 and 1971, millions of gallons were sprayed across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to destroy dense jungle foliage and crops, depriving enemy forces of cover and food–and in the process, poisoning the soil, water, people and animals. [1, 2]
As Tern observed, “Laos became the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.”
After fleeing to a Thai refugee camp, his family eventually was granted asylum by the U.S. “The escape to the refugee camp was an ordeal,” Tern said. The terrain was difficult and the journey long and dangerous. “Once they reached the camp, the refugees were often looted and beaten and the women were taken advantage of. It was not easy.”
In 1980 Tern’s family arrived in Portland through a refugee program. Tern was only three years old, so he doesn’t remember all the details. But he did recollect that “There were not very many Southeast Asians here at the time, so the Mien refugees stuck together in our own community. We lived in apartments. Farming is all they knew so they all had small gardens to grow food to feed their families. They did seasonal agricultural work to make some money to live – picking berries, cucumbers. They were unskilled and spoke no English. We struggled.”
California’s San Joaquin Valley looked more promising for farming jobs, so in 1985 the family–now Tern, three younger sisters and a new baby brother– joined about 200 other immigrant families in Visalia, California.
“I enjoyed my life there,” Tern said. “My father worked in the fields, I went to elementary school. We hung out with other Southeast Asian and Hispanic kids, rode bikes all day. We’d walk out into the peach and orange orchards and swim in the irrigation canals. I enjoyed the farm country life.”
The family moved several times to look for work in Salinas, then Long Beach. But nothing really worked out. When Tern was in sixth grade they moved to the farming community of Redding, California, to join the rest of his family, uncles and grandparents.
These were difficult years for Tern. “It was really all white there and they were completely ignorant about refugees,” he remembered painfully. “I had been in the U.S. since I was three. I spoke perfect English and they put me in the classes with all the non-English speakers, the ESL classes. I had always been a good student and I went from being in advanced classes in Long Beach to these classes. I didn’t complain because it was easy and I didn’t have to study. But later I suffered academically.”
When Tern got to high school, things got worse. “It was very racist there, very white and conservative,” he said. “There weren’t very many nonwhites, so we all hung out together because even though we were all different, we were all on the losing side so we had that as our bond. We got classified as Asian gangs because we got into fights with racist groups, but really we were just clustered as friends trying to protect each other. And we were all small, being Asian, so we needed to protect ourselves. We had fled war, we were not afraid of fighting or getting beat up.”
After a fight with “most of the football team”—Tern chuckled when he said this–“I was expelled. I was sent to the Bad Kids School,” the local alternative high school. “It was good there. Very diverse, Asians, Latinos, Blacks, Whites, all trouble makers in regular school but there I fit in and did not fight..”
He studied hard in his new high school, graduated early in 1994 and continued his studies at Shasta Community College. For a short while he moved back to Portland and worked for a vitamin company. But he soon decided “I wanted to do more in life than just a job. I wasn’t satisfied. I needed to do something meaningful with my life. I went to college so I could be in a situation where I can help people.”
He returned to California and graduated from the California State University, Chico, with a Bachelor’s degree in Business and Human Resources Management in 2003.
Returning to Portland in 2003, he married May Saechao, and they soon welcomed the first of what would eventually grow to be four children. He was determined to support his family so they would have a life of opportunity and stability and, he emphasized, “they would never have to endure the hardships I experienced.” He worked for two years as a manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, and then moved on to a job with the Oregon Department of Human Services, finally achieving his goal of service to underserved people.
My job was very fulfilling,” he said. “I was a family coach, directly helping families organize their lives. I set them up to get jobs with work experience, training, cash assistance when needed. I believe in supporting folks where I can, creating a situation where they don’t have to experience the issues I had to experience growing up.”
Tern spent long hours working and at the same time going to Portland State University, where he earned a Master’s Degree in Social Work in 2020.
As much as he enjoyed working with the families, Tern said “I decided I wanted to do more to impact change. To work more on systemic change rather than direct work with individuals.” In 2021, he came to APANO to work in advocacy and community engagement.
He loved being able to “engage the Asian community on how to participate in civic life to have an impact – like how to vote or get government leadership training. I also help advocate for policies to support families that are struggling. When one comes from a marginalized situation, they need to work harder than others to get the same result. I want to work on creating systems so that families have the opportunity for better education and to do whatever they need to do to be successful.”
In addition to working hard for the immigrant community, Tern had been working to build a school in his family’s ancestral village in Laos.
Tern eloquently summed up his passion for creating a better world: “I understand the challenges people go through and the hardships and I want to do more, to be able to support them, to help out, to make more of an impact on people’s lives. I hope someday through systemic change I can leave some kind of legacy.” He laughed, “Tern was here.”