Featuring a poetic deliberation on the tiger as a Korean icon and metaphor, If You Go When Will You Return delicately deconstructs the author’s associations of tigers with identity on a national, cultural, and personal level. The prose offered presents anecdotes of a ‘lost daughter’ that demonstrate the complexity of the tiger as part of Whang’s relationship to Korean womanhood, filial piety, and a thoughtful re-calculation of intertwined tropic characterizations.