Some people are questioning whether Eileen Chang had actually been to the countryside before she wrote The Rice Sprout Song. If the answer is negative, then all her depictions of the countryside are imaginary and of no realistic basis. Two approaches could be used to answer this question. Before she fled to the United States, she joined a land reform team and helped implement rural revolution for two months, and such experience later inspired and informed her on this novel. Also, it is necessary for the readers to examine closely at one of her other published work, Foreign Land (《异乡记》), which is essentially a scattered collection of her travel proses. This over 30000 words piece of work was about the actual things she saw and heard over her journey from Shanghai to Wenzhou passing through Huanan countryside to meet Hu Lancheng. A lot of the countryside depictions in The Rice Sprout Song appeared first in her Foreign Land (《异乡记》), which was published only after Eileen Chang's death. In a way, Foreign Land () could be seen as the prototype of The Rice Sprout Song. There are plenty of examples for this assumption, to list just a few: the latrine, shop, and short stone wall depictions in Chapter 1 of The Rice Sprout Song could be traced in Chapter 4 of Foreign Land (《异乡记》); What Gold Root T'an (Jingen) saw from his walk over the field path in Chapter 2 of The Rice Sprout Song could be traced in Chapter 1 of Foreign Land (《异乡记》) where there's similar scenery depiction through looking out the train window. The pig slaughtering scene in Chapter 12 of The Rice Sprout Song could again be traced in Chapter 6 of Foreign Land (《异乡记》).
