The film follows Bill’s adventures as a child of a bank robber, raised in a gilded household, who turned his back on American devotion to materialism and went off to live in monasteries and mountains in Taiwan. He pursued a fascination with Buddhism and poetry and traveled to remote regions of China to rediscover an ancient tradition of mountain hermits vital to Chinese culture.
Bill Porter is an American translator of Chinese poetry and spiritual texts. He translates under the name Red Pine. His 1993 travelogue "Road to Heaven" detailed the surviving Chinese hermit tradition in the Chungnan Mountains and he has since appeared in several documentaries on the subject.