Roasting Catherine Wu, Former Life & Chief Digital Editor
By ERIN HAN ‘26
I thought to myself while attempting several times to organize roast-worthy, albeit disorganized, comments and quotes targeting Life Editor Catherine Wu.
I went through several scrapped drafts (this step of finding the ideal format in which to roast was a painstaking process; fortunately, substance was not an issue- there was more than enough material to work with): a day-in-the-life narrative with baked-in roasts? A low-effort list of quotes from secondary sources (I love Catherine too much to do that)?
At my lowest point, I even considered writing a deceptive, ultimately flattering article filled with back-ended-insults and disguised compliments. Truly a last resort.
But then, when I reviewed my week-old notes app folder dedicated to this article, (yes I realize now that I might have put an excessive amount of effort into this) I saw a beauty in its glorious chaos and it hit me: a good roast does not come in the form of organized prose or a list. It’s chaos in and of itself- an emotional pummeling of sorts that knows no bounds.
Any imperfections you may see in my writing is, of course, an intentional choice staying true to this Pollock-esque approach.
In addition to editing for The Exonian and Matter Magazine, Catherine Wu coheads 17348327 other clubs, and is bound to be exceeding some maximum sanity quota. Thus it is not uncommon for club members to be confused by a long thread of Outlook emails from the same address, certain that the ‘Catherine’ that’s signed off at the bottom of the email is someone new, but it never is.
When she’s not in the headspace of cohead, or editor, or such, according to secondary sources, her vocabulary range contracts dramatically. Peculiar word choices are made habitually by Catherine, with ‘opp,’ ‘fake,’ and the effect of being ‘fake,’ ‘to defriend’ making regular comebacks.
She also speaks randomly good Korean and has an unexpectedly expansive Korean vocabulary.
However, when she’s in her editor headspace, Wu is professional. When writers are not on schedule, Wu attempts to intimidate them with passive aggressive messages, but forgets the fact that her profile picture is a 0.5.
Picture this (verbatim):
*@s writers*
“If you guys are not setting up interviews right now I will be adding other writers to this article and taking you off of this group chat, it’s not acceptable to be this unresponsive.”
“It’s already thursday, this isn’t okay guys.”
Then if you track your eyes the slightest to your left, you see her profile picture features an upwards-glaring Catherine, dim-lit and forehead elongated.
But vocabulary range is not the only thing that changes with switching between her cohead and friend personas, according to a secondary source. Upper Davido Zhang said, “Her entire sense of humor is based off of being mean to other people.” He continued (for a while): “Her entire life is constructed upon clubs, so she has taken on this bipolar personality of being nice to lowerclassmen but mean to her friends—”
Your friends really are your biggest supporters, Catherine.
Upper Davido Zhang’s final words were, “I can’t keep going [on with the jokes] because then it gets too real and [they] won’t be funny anymore,”
So this article ends on a Dickensian note, letting all readers know that there are several roastable features out there pertaining to the seemingly perfect Catherine Wu that can’t fit within this article’s word count; but for now I think this suffices to deserve: boom, roasted.
