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Mr Teo Cher Soon forged a closer bond with daughter Ka Hoon by reading to her. -- ST PHOTOS: DESMOND FOO, SHAHRIYA YAHAYA Name: Teo Cher Soon
Age: 45
Occupation: Senior bus captain
Mr Teo Cher Soon has every reason to be proud of his daughter Ka Hoon. At the tender age of seven, she was already familiar with popular Chinese literary classics such as The Three Kingdoms and Journey To The West.
Her interest was piqued through Chinese literature games her dad loved to play on his PlayStation I console.
Mr Teo told LifeStyle in Mandarin that she would 'snatch the game controls from me to play and ask a lot of questions about the game'. 'That's how I got her interested,' he said.
He then started to give his daughter, now 14, Chinese literature-related comic books to encourage her to read.
He also spent half an hour to 45 minutes every night after work reading Chinese children's fairytales to her while his wife, Madam Kee Loy Tee, 43, prepared dinner at their Serangoon North HDB flat.
Seeing how well her husband got along with their daughter, Madam Kee let him take over the storyteller role as she 'did not have the patience', she said.
Apart from helping her build a reading habit, the time spent together allowed him to forge a close father-daughter relationship.
'She's my only child and it was the only time that I could spend time with her,' said the soft-spoken father, who first started reading to Ka Hoon when she was three. Now, his Secondary 2 daughter is a book lover who can polish off a Chinese novel in a day.
To feed her voracious appetite for books, the Serangoon Gardens Secondary School student borrows books from public libraries at Compass Point and Hougang Mall on weekends.
Her love for Chinese books has helped her with the language, too. She is usually one of the top scorers in her class in that subject.
This article was first published in The Sunday Times.
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