Mary Kay ring new doorbells

DALLAS - Hope of joining China's growing middle class drove Xiang Jun Mei, a poor rice farmer's daughter, to hawk Mary Kay products door-to-door and to everyone she met.

Wang Di started selling the American cosmetics to spice up her days of plodding, wifely chores and to earn the respect of her executive husband.

Both women see in themselves something of the late Mary Kay Ash, the bouffant, pink Cadillac-driving Texan who founded Mary Kay cosmetics in 1963. Increasingly, the company sees its future in these Chinese entrepreneurs.

China is the company's fastest-growing and second-largest market, and it is expected to surpass the United States in sales in the next 10 years. Growing ranks of Chinese women are donning the Mary Kay uniform of tailored suits, reading Ash's books translated into Mandarin, holding skin-care classes and professing the blonde matriarch's go-getter philosophy.