For some reason part participles are particularly hard for me too (native English speaker who speaks no other languages fluently). (they must just be a mess in English? I can't imagine how non-native speakers ever get any of them)
I wouldn’t say that Chinese verbs have no tense so much as that they are uninflected and that tense is marked with particles (which admittedly do not cause difficulties with irregular infexions).
Chinese technically does not have grammar tenses, but it has aspects indicated by particles. They mark the completion status, direction, presence, and so on.
However, the verbs themselves don't have tense. So these sentences can be identical: "I will walk home, then I will eat a cake" and "I walked home, then I ate a cake".
The overall timeframe can be given by a larger context: "Once my shift is over, I ..." / "I drank too much yesterday, that's all I remember: ".
It's simply not possible in English because every verb has a grammar tense built into it.
I'm going to go with swutcheted