A random act of kindness was the opportunity of a lifetime for one Taylor Swift fan in Vancouver over the weekend.
The pop megastar has officially come and gone, wrapping up her two-year-long Eras Tour with a three-day stop at BC Place.
Hundreds of thousands of fans attended the three shows from Friday to Sunday, and thousands more gathered outside the venue, desperate to be a part of the moment — even if they couldn’t get inside the stadium.
Yendi Pang says her family was part of the crowd hoping to score some last-minute tickets to the show Saturday.
“Obviously, the tickets dropped a year ago, and we weren’t lucky enough to get any… And everything on the resale market was quite outrageous. And so we decided we would go downtown and experience it,” Pang explained.
She says two girls, holding a sign that read ‘We will accept tickets,’ offered it to her 13-year-old daughter, Sydney.
“She took the sign, and she held it for another — gosh, I don’t know, an hour? An hour and a half in front of the gates? — and these two strangers saw her and… said to her, ‘I have an extra ticket. Do you want to go?’”
She says Sydney couldn’t even process what was happening at first.
“She was just in tears. Just overwhelmed and over the moon,” said Pang.
As the family escorted her daughter into the show, Pang noticed that one of them, a man, stayed behind.
“I walked over there, and I was like, ‘You gave up your seat?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah.’ I’m like, ‘So my daughter could see the show?’ And he’s like, ‘Yes.’”
She says the man was able to see the previous night’s show, and after getting more tickets at face value, decided to offer his to another Swiftie.
The woman, Bernice Hannah Padua, took Sydney to the show, and her husband, Ian, stood outside in the cold for hours with Pang.
“Their selflessness brought me both guilt and deep gratitude. It’s a reminder that kindness still exists in the world,” said Pang.
Padua says she wanted to pay kindness forward after experiencing many nice gestures herself, since moving to B.C.
—With files from Raynaldo Suarez and Angela Bower