There weren’t reading drills - it was just a constant activity. Any time we were out, they’d be pointing at signs and nudging me through sounding them out. I think the first word that I got the hang of reading was “garage” - it fascinated me that both g and a had two totally different sounds in a short word, and I probably saw it dozens of times a day around HK. At home I’d sit under the stairs painstakingly decrypting large print picture books. I’ve since applied the same technique to the Cyrillic, Arabic, and Japanese (Kanji+Kana) alphabets, and while I can speak nothing in any of those scripts well, being able to read them is unbelievably useful - and it was purely reading signs, menus, any simple printed information, and repeating until I was reading and pronouncing, if not understanding, confidently, if not well. To be honest, large print picture books probably would have helped. The other drawback of this approach to language is that one ends up with a somewhat archaic lexicon, and some stunning mispronunciations. I am in my mid 30s and still occasionally realise that I have been saying a common word incorrectly for my entire life - “origin” is the most recent example that springs to mind.

Hyperlexia - the term first crossed my path around eight or so, and struck and strikes me yet me as odd, insofar as it doesn’t define any special characteristic other than early and persistent reading. “Curious” is perhaps a better, if broader, moniker - and I guess if there’s one thing that underpins my parents’ entire pedagogical approach it was the imbuement of wonder into the world - everything was a mystery to be solved. They usually couldn’t give me answers, as they were young and unworldly, but they would answer my questions with a Socratic “what do you think?”, which would usually prompt me into going and reading something that might shed some light, or reasoning out the answer using my extant precepts.

So... while their focus might have been almost myopically on reading, it might not have worked had I been such a willing participant, and exposed to many, many things that made my infantile mind whirl.

Don’t get me wrong, I had crappy parents, like most people - but they got something really right in my early engagement with the printed word, whether advertently or serendipitously. It even meant that when my kid sister came along, while I was seven, that they were off the hook, as I wanted to read to her, and share this incredible world of words with my sibling - and she too was devouring books at an early age, stealing dog-eared Victorian adventure novels from my shelves - and yet her early years were far less experiential than mine, growing up in sheltered British suburbia rather than the neon-lit sweat-drenched riot of crass commercialism and swineherds, both literal and figurative, that was Hong Kong. She likewise was ahead at school, is knowledgeable about the world, has forged a path less trodden - so perhaps the early reading bit remains more important than the direct environment - after all, a good book is as good as a time machine and teleporter, and can take you anywhere.