“Somebody better tell me,” she remembers thinking. “Because I’m gonna find out. One of my actor friends was like, ‘It’s Ryan Coogler.’” She didn’t believe them.

When Proximity Media asked if she was interested in being a consultant, Li was hesitant. “It was exciting, but also really nerve-racking, because I also understood the implication of being the main point person for these characters,” she says of Bo and Grace Chow, the film’s husband-and-wife grocery-store owners played by Yao and Li Jun Li. “And because I don’t know what the script is, I don’t know how these characters are going to be manifested on screen.”

When Coogler shared that his family had discovered his father-in-law has Mississippi Delta Chinese ancestry, Li felt relief. “That helped me understand what his curiosity was and his connection to it,” she says.

Coogler and his team’s commitment to detail and historical accuracy made it clear to Li that these characters were not an afterthought. The grocery store owners could easily have been cast as Black or white, and no one would have noted an absence of Chinese American representation in Sinners. Instead Coogler opted to do the more challenging thing, weaving a complex history that forces viewers to confront the violence propelling America’s racial entanglements.

Li saw this choice as an act of camaraderie. “It forces you to reckon with their existence and their humanity becomes undeniable,” she says.

Beauty is in the details

Viewers are first privy to this history when we see Lisa Chow (Grace and Bo’s daughter) cross the street from the Min Sang grocery serving Black customers to the store where her mother is serving white customers.

This seemingly small detail is evidence of considerable effort and intention. (The crew built an entire set for a scene that lasted mere moments.) Yet it’s this scene that sparked some of the more nuanced conversations about the reality, and absurdity, of Jim Crow segregation.

Li worked closely with Monique Champagne, the set designer who created the store, to get everything just right. “Portraying it accurately was so important to her and Ryan and the rest of the production crew,” Li says. “When I saw the store manifest on screen, I screamed a tiny scream out loud. I was just finally seeing all of this work that was put into it come to life.”

Li says this level of attention went into every aspect of the script, and the world Sinners ultimately portrayed. Li Jun Li and Yao told Li they watched her documentary daily to practice their Southern accents. “I was so excited to hear the accents,” Li says. “I thought they did such an incredible job.”

Accents and dialects are crucial elements throughout the film. In the final and most dramatic act, it’s how certain words are said: the vampire Remmick speaks to Grace Chow directly in Taisan, which Li describes as “a really, really old-school dialect.”

“It was the dialect spoken by a lot of early immigrants in the 1800s,” she explains. Remmick speaks not just Grace’s mother tongue, but her village tongue, making the character’s motivations that much clearer. “I think that is probably what triggers the deep fire, anger and fear in Grace,” Li says. “I can see why her character completely lost her shit over it.”

At the end of the day, Sinners is still a vampire movie, with all of the horror and horniness the genre requires. As Li was checking in with everyone, she gave Frieda Quon, whose family grocery store inspired the film’s two shops, a call.

“She was so funny. She was like, ‘Dolly, what do vampires have to do with being Chinese?’” Li laughed, recalling their exchange. “They are Southern ladies, so they’re like, ‘Oh, well, some of the stuff they were saying is more daring than what we were saying.’ A lot of the sexier scenes and sexier lines are making them blush.”

For Jun Stinson Yamagishi, one of the documentary’s producers, the inclusion of the world and history of the Mississippi Delta Chinese in Sinners was a reminder of the power good journalism and storytelling can wield in society. “It made me really think about the importance of doing this work and telling these stories that aren’t being widely told,” Yamagishi says. “They influence historical memory, and then they influence art.”

It all comes down to being able to see marginalized communities as real people, with real stories and lineages worth preserving, remembering and exploring — especially on the big screen. That is what stays with Li the most.

“I think that is one of the coolest parts of the results of this film, that they’re undeniable people now,” she says of the fictional Chows. “Yes, I made this documentary, but it had to be codified by the director of Black Panther for it to be very real to people.”