The Good Earth 2

In the fifth and sixth chapters, Wang Lung makes a small profit from his small farm, so he decides to buy a little piece of land from the estate of the great house and life seems to be going well. However, the next year, things take a turn for the worse: "The rains, which should have come in early summer, withheld themselves, and day after day the skies shone with fresh and careless briliance."
From the preceding passage, we can infer two things: that the farmers in Wang Lung's village are in trouble, and that the author places an emphasis upon the land in her writing style.
The drought gets so bad that Wang Lung and his family are forced to migrate south, to a big city. Wang Lung, however, makes a point of not selling his land or his house, so he has something to return to. In the big city, the reader gets a glimpse into the author's view of the socioeconomic divisions that plauged the urban areas of pre-Revolutionary China. The poor of the city live in small huts made of mats along the side of some rich guy's large house, with several huts fitting along a single wall. The poor are forced to eat rice for almost all their meals, while the rich can eat anything they want.