Former Shanghai art teacher now homeless in B.C. park

Tom Tang, a 76-year-old former art teacher and street portraitist from Shanghai, now lives in a tent in Brighouse Neighbourhood Park in Richmond, B.C.—a path he cannot quite explain.

"Time all blurs together when you spend a long time wandering on the streets," Tang said in Shanghainese. "I don't know what date it is."

Tang came to Canada in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square killings. He married, had a son, and lived in an apartment. After nearly 40 years in the country, his belongings now fit in two small plastic bags. He's been homeless for a year and a half.

Now he sits in a park befriending the people around him—drug dealers and addicts—checking on them while they sleep to make sure they're breathing. When dealers ask if he wants to try drugs, he jokes that he has no money anyway. He shares his cigarettes and tries to stay on good terms with everyone so nobody robs him.

Outreach worker Hugh Freiberg with Richmond's Refuge Church says Tang employs a survival mechanism in his friendliness. "He tries to get along with everybody so that nobody will rob him or steal his stuff." But Freiberg also sees something that troubles him: seniors like Tang, with no substance use or mental health issues, standing out as people who worked their whole lives and did nothing wrong, yet ended up on the street with minimal provincial support.

Tang says he has no success securing a long-term care bed. Wait times exceed two years. B.C. seniors advocate Dan Levitt said seniors unfamiliar with English or Canadian systems face "double jeopardy or triple jeopardy." Between 2016 and 2025, B.C.'s long-term care wait-list tripled, from 2,381 to 7,212.

Richmond's main shelter houses 60 people—a third of them seniors, three-quarters refugees or immigrants. But residents can only stay 30 days. Then they're back on the streets.

"We try to keep these people alive and try to minimize their suffering," Freiberg said. "But the longer that they're out there, the more stress is caused to their mental and psychological health."

Freiberg first met Tang outside a convenience store and began buying him meals every day. Tang had been sleeping in a 7-Eleven lobby until staff asked him to move on. His case underscores an urgent need to expand long-term care and seniors' affordable housing across the province.