It’s a Kind of Magic: Possible descendant of 1900s Chinese American magician Mac Fee Lung gets in touch
Sarah Sadler grew up knowing she had Chinese ancestry, but without any details. Having taken a DNA test, she has discovered that she may be the great-granddaughter of ‘Prince’ Mac Fee Lung and his white English wife Jennie Lung. Mac Fee Lung was a Chinese American magician who features in our By the Cut of Their Cloth exhibition. The couple’s divorce made headlines in 1907 when the magician described his wife and sometime assistant as “too stout” to perform one of his famous magic tricks. Now we’re asking for help from family historians to piece together more of the story.
Sarah Sadler (2026) and Mac Fee Lung (1900)
The story of Chinese American magician Mac Fee Lung and his wife Jennie
One of the things we enjoy being part of at The Mixed Museum is what happens after a story is shared. Launched in June 2022, our exhibition By the Cut of Their Cloth — developed in collaboration with artist Warren Reilly — explored the multiracial and mixed race history of the London Borough of Brent. Part of the project involved exploring information held at the Brent Museum and Archives to discover possible areas of investigation for where and how mixed race families in the borough might have formed and settled.
One story we found was an account of Mac Fee Lung, a Chinese American magician whose life, including his marriage to a white English woman called Jennie Mucklow and their widely reported divorce, offered a glimpse into early twentieth-century Anglo-Chinese lives in Britain.
Mac Fee Lung was born in 1878 in Chinatown, San Francisco. A report from 1896 places him as part of a double act on stage in New York, with the stage name ‘Prince Fee Lung’. A few years later, he was invited to work with the magician Chung Ling Soo and the pair travelled to Europe. They arrived in the UK in 1900, where he met and married Jennie Mucklow.
The element that caught the imagination of the press was that during a court case after their marriage had broken down, Mac Fee gave evidence that the reason he had stopped taking her on tour was because she was too fat to perform some of the magic tricks essential to his show.
Fascinated by the story and its twists and turns, we included a message in our exhibition page encouraging any descendants to get in touch.
From DNA testing to The Mixed Museum
We were delighted to be contacted recently by Sarah Sadler, a yoga teacher from Chelmsford who was researching her family history. Sarah had long known about a Chinese connection in her family, but it had rarely been discussed. Names had shifted over time, and details remained unclear.
But after taking a DNA test and following up online leads via Ancestry.com, Sarah began to suspect that her great-grandfather — remembered within the family as ‘Frederick Lung’ – may in fact be the same figure we have written about as Mac Fee Lung. A distant relative who is a descendant of Jennie Lung’s brother contacted Sarah through Ancestry.com and told her about The Mixed Museum’s page on Mac Fee Lung, and that was when Sarah excitedly got in touch.
“I was completely surprised to find The Mixed Museum’s research and realise that Mac Fee must be my great-grandfather,” she says. “I must admit, I had never imagined we’d find anything quite as interesting!
“Unfortunately, I think my grandmother, who I now believe was Mac Fee and Jennie Lung’s daughter, was ashamed – or made to feel ashamed – of her heritage, so it was partially hidden and not discussed. She changed the spelling of her name from her birth spelling of 'Maie' to 'May', and although we always knew of the Chinese connection, it was not discussed.
“It was only when I did my DNA to confirm the story that this all came out. Whilst I used to do a little bit of amateur dance when I was younger, and can master a basic set of juggling balls, I don't think I have inherited the showbiz genes!”
From archive to connection
This is not the first time that By the Cut of Their Cloth has led to new discoveries. When we shared the story of the Mayling sisters, descendants came forward after recognising their family in the archive.
The story involves Mafooz Ali Khan, a wealthy young Indian man related to the Begum of Bhopal, and Marjorie Mayling, a white woman from Stonebridge Park. The pair met at the Wembley Exhibition of 1924, where Marjorie was working as a waitress. Falling in love at first sight, they married and moved to India within three months of meeting. The romance attracted intense press interest, with newspapers following their story for several years.
Our team was surprised by the unusually positive coverage of a mixed marriage and put out a call to family historians to see if anyone could help the museum find out more. Amazingly, Marjorie’s great-great-niece saw the call and got in touch. She was able to provide family photos and also share the fact that Marjorie’s sister Phyllis had also married a wealthy Indian man, whom she met while visiting Marjorie, and had also settled in India in the late 1920s.
We are hoping that Sarah’s enquiry to the museum might also lead to further discoveries about Mac Fee and Jennie Lung’s story.
Can you help?
Sarah Sadler has kindly shared an image of her grandmother, Maie Lillian Lung, who she believes is the daughter of Jennie and Mac Fee Lung. The family link appears very likely, but we would now like help to establish it with certainty.
At The Mixed Museum, we are committed to bringing mixed family histories out from the archives to help people understand the interconnected nature of our global migration histories, and this is a really good example of that work.
If you are a family historian or researcher who might be interested in volunteering some time to help take Sarah's story further, please get in touch with us at info@mixedmuseum.org. We would love to hear from you.
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