For eight gut-wrenching years, Dan Thanh Vo’s family thought he was dead.
Then, in November, came the stunning news: Dan, living with severe mental illness, had been found on the streets in Victoria, half a continent away from where he had disappeared.
And then came the frustration. As desperate as his family is to bring Dan home to Ontario, red tape has stranded him here, unable to travel.
After all those lonely years of sleeping in Chinatown doorways, eating out of garbage cans, being stabbed and beaten, and trying to cope with untreated schizophrenia in a friendless world, a lack of identification documents has grounded him here, unable to fly home.
“I hope to have ID with pictures so I can go back to Ontario,” he says in a quiet voice, sitting in the downtown rooming house where he has lived since late November. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of his family, mental-health workers, politicians and bureaucrats, the documents he needs remain elusive. He turns 60 this year.
His story goes back to 1990 when his family fled Vietnam, where he was born. They spent 21Ú2 years in a Thai refugee camp before settling in Toronto, where Dan eventually gained Canadian citizenship. Today, he has two brothers in Ontario — one in Milton, near Toronto, the other in Barrie — another brother in the U.S. and two sisters in Vietnam.
It was around the end of 2000 that Dan’s behaviour began to change. At one point, he told his brother Dan Tam Vo — whom we’ll call Vo — that he was hearing voices in his head. Dan went missing for a long period, then called from the West Coast. The family brought him back to Toronto, only to have him disappear again. “We looked for him everywhere,” Vo said. Dan emerged in Montreal.
It was in 2007 while Dan was in Montreal that, listening to the voice in his head, he smashed the window of his apartment. His aunt paid for the damage, and persuaded the landlord not to kick him out, but then Dan broke the window again. After police took Dan to hospital, Vo brought him back to Toronto.
A few months later, Dan vanished once more, staying off the grid until March 2011, when he phoned from an Ottawa homeless shelter. His relatives drove to Ottawa but Dan balked at coming back with them; Vo says Dan didn’t want to burden them with giving him the help he needed.
Dan eventually relented, though. The family bought him a bus ticket back to Toronto, where he hung in for awhile before, out of the blue, disappearing again one day in late 2011.
“Suddenly, he’s gone,” Vo said.
“The first year, we were looking everywhere.” They scoured the streets of Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Vo tried to file a missing persons complaint with the Ottawa police, but they told him to go to their Toronto counterparts instead, which he did. No luck. He pleaded with Dan’s bank to let him know if there was any activity in the account — Vo had sent Dan money — but the bank refused, citing confidentiality.
Eventually, Vo had a dream that his brother was dead. So did other family members. As time dragged on with no word of Dan, they came to accept that it was true.
He wasn’t dead, though. He had gone first to Vancouver, where he spent a few months in a shelter, and then Victoria. “It’s better for me to be here because Vancouver is so big,” Dan says. When you carry all your possessions on your back, a compact community is better.
In Victoria, his untreated schizophrenia left him unable to organize his life, but still able to function well enough to survive without attracting too much attention. He was a fixture in Chinatown, and police were aware of him, but for some reason the Toronto missing-person file never popped up.
It was a hard life. “I have no money,” Dan says. He slept in doorways. “I eat food in the garbage cans.”
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