Gallery: different childhoods

    UN-China program blesses street children

    ZHENGZHOU, May 31 (Xinhua) -- Home meant anything but warmth to Wang Qi when he, then 12 years old, was rejected by his divorced parents four years ago, but a mimetic family program is reshaping the boy's idea, if more, perhaps, his life.

    When the boy who left his parents in Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi Province in 2002 was picked up three years later by a street children's center in Zhengzhou, a city 500 km away in central Henan Province, the poor waif was "somber, sensitive and extremely defensive," according to Lu Jinwei, his "father" in the mimetic family. Full story