Editor’s Preface

Episode 7 of the First Season of Orange Is the New Black begins with a reflection on speech and silence. The women of Litchfield Prison have just elected four members of an advisory council, three representing a major racial group and one an “other” category, which seems to refer to senior citizens and miscellaneous inmates who aren’t easily categorized. Sam Healy, the counselor who organized the council, begins their first meeting by offering them donuts, and then demands that they not tell anyone else about this treat or they will not receive one in the future. The meeting literally begins with a request that the women who are there to speak remain silent.

Next, each woman is asked to offer her thoughts on the “concerns of their fellow inmates.” The first to talk is a Latina, Maria Ruiz, who complains about the pillows being too thin. The second is an African American, Tasha “Taystee” Jefferson, who wants “rooster sauce” served in the cafeteria, and access to print erotica. The third is the college-educated, middle-class, white lead character Piper Chapman, who proceeds to list four significant changes she’d like to see. While the language of her plea is one of improving the qualify of life for all inmates, it’s clear that the requests would most directly benefit her. She asks for a resumption of GED classes, for instance, and stresses the opportunity for one of the inmates to be the teacher. As Ruiz and Jefferson signal, they are aware that Chapman is speaking primarily about herself—just as they themselves have done in a more open manner.

Finally, the representative of the “other,” a character known only as Chang, is asked for her input. She responds, “OK, Mr. Healy, OK.” When asked again, she repeats, “OK.” Chang is the most minor of recurring characters in the show, and has the most minimal speaking parts. It’s never clear how well she can speak English, nor how she ended up in prison. In this scene, she sits to the far left of Healy and the camera’s focus remains consistently on the three other women. Visually, she hardly registers except for a few flashing close-ups; she herself seems to be looking down, and thus to efface herself. When Jefferson brings up the erotica, the other women say they have copies of the book she wants. When Chang also says the name of the book, blinking rather than winking, the looks of the other women are of surprise and even discomfort. They don’t seem to know what to do with her familiarity, or the possibility that she might have a sexuality. Chapman twists her body around, so that she’s leaning away as she looks at Chang.

We can easily read this scene, then, as reflecting the ways in which Asian Americans in general are often silent figures in popular media, the characters on television shows and in movies who have the least to say and the least to do. Chang is a presence both fleeting and perpetually cipher-like. But we should also consider what the point of this scene is, which is that the advisory council itself was created by Healy to give the inmates a meaningless sense of agency. As he explained in an earlier episode to another prison employee, his mother had asked him when he was a child whether he wanted to take a bath before or after dinner. In either case, he was going to get wet. The same applies to the advisory council: they can ask for things, but, as Healy says at the end of the meeting, because of budget constraints it would be very hard for him to give them any one of these things and to bring donuts to their meetings “and coffee.”

The donuts and coffee are thus meant to buy the women’s silence about how ineffective their pleas for reform are. The humor of this scene is that this is a point that all the other inmates, except for Chapman, are already aware of. The ruse fools almost no one, but everyone plays along because it was...