He had difficulty understanding why this might be wrong. He learned to play the piano when he was six but still did things his way. One day, he came home from primary school to declare: 'The music teacher asked me to be accompanist for the choir. I turned her down.'

It never occurred to him that he should consult his parents first.

Fabian's sense of self-confidence verged on pompousness. On Mother's Day, for instance, he would hand-paint a card to present to Helena my wife, with the scrawled words 'You must be a proud mother to have a son like me!'

Helena hoped that by the end of primary school Fabian would learn a lesson about not becoming too conceited, but not too harsh of one.

After proceeding to secondary school, Fabian displayed a marked change in his Form One year. We kept two cars. Fabian usually commuted by minibus to and from school. But on the occasions when Helena offered to drive to the school to pick him up, Fabian would ask which car she was driving.

'If it is the BMW, come to the school entrance. But if it's the Mazda you're driving, then park around the corner and wait for me.' Naturally, that aroused our curiosity.

Then one day we accidentally overheard him talking on the phone, saying at intervals things like 'we have 12 bedrooms in our house ... we have four roof gardens ... we have six swimming pools!'

We realised that the situation was getting out of control. Students at this prestigious school included descendants of some of the richest families in Hong Kong, but we never expected our son to be under pressure to compete in a ludicrous 'wealthier than thou' race.

In secondary school, Fabian was less confident than he had been. The girls reigned supreme academically as well as in extracurricular areas. He felt bullied and outdone by them and was becoming depressed. We also didn't like the way he felt inferior to his richer classmates.

We wanted our son to be cured of conceit, but not pushed to the other extreme of losing self confidence. And so I approached the principal of my alma mater, a government secondary school for boys. Fabian was transferred to Form Two there the following September.

Fortunately, just as I hoped, my old school had stayed the same way as when I was there: students came from different family backgrounds, and the rich mixed well with the less well-to-do, which created a good community atmosphere.

The important thing was that at this school, friendship was never tempered by differences in either academic achievements or family wealth. I recalled my own school days when classmates would help one another, in an exchange of those strong tutoring those weak in each subject. Fabian was fascinated by this new climate of comradeship.

At his original school, the competition would make a student who came across a useful reference book keep it to himself. But at the new school, he would share it with all his friends. Fabian soon regained his confidence, and even agreed to be the pianist for the school choir.

After completing fifth form, Fabian requested to study overseas to widen his horizons and brush up his English. 'I am the student with the best English results in my class, but I know my English is not good enough when I go to inter-school debates and hear how the girls speak,' he argued.

We gladly complied, seeing that he was mature enough to plan for his own future. He carried the chummy spirit with him to Sevenoaks in England, then on to university in the United States. I believe he still gets on well with his workmates now, irrespective of their gender.

Rupert Chan is a recently retired university administrator, and chairman of the Chung Ying Theatre Company