On the surface, Tribecan Michelle Jungmin Bang was firing on all cylinders: she was living in Hong Kong, raising a young family and running an award-winning sustainable fashion company that she started herself. But a one-night stint in the hospital forced her to evaluate what had become chronic pain — and launched a years-long journey into finding solutions.

“I had gotten so used to a culture of achievement — I was just muscling through the aches and pains,” Michelle said. “The hospital stay was brief — one night — but I was someone who had never been sick before and now I was sick night and day. Every time I sat down to eat it was excruciating. It made me pause and think about how I wanted to live my life.”

That was 2018, and fast forward these years later and her book, “Sun & Ssukgat: The Korean Art of Self-Care, Wellness & Longevity,” will be released next week. It’s available for pre-order now. A combination of research, recipes, interviews and tips that she collected (along with her illustrations) while travelling across Asia, the book is a culmination but also in a way the start of a new approach to her own lifestyle and health.

“When I got sick, I realized I lived on a continent that thought of food as medicine,” she said. “I wanted to share what I learned and maybe prevent what happened to me. People are getting to leadership roles and getting pretty sick.”

Raised in Mill Basin, Michelle went to Stuy for high school, Wellesley for undergrad, Harvard for business school, and as the co-founder and founding CEO of The R Collective (formerly BYT), she secured international funding and prizes for a sustainable fashion brand that created affordable luxury pieces out of high-end materials that would otherwise have been disposed of in a landfill. (The family moved back to Tribeca in 2021 after 16 years in Hong Kong.)

After the hospital stay, she enrolled in a course — and then a one-year program — with the Dr. Sears Wellness Institute, working towards a certificate in holistic health and East-West nutrition and movement. She then travelled with the group through China and would go on to cross Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines, ultimately connecting with her Korean heritage. “I thought it would be a one-year personal project and it became a six years of interviews and surveys and still counting.”

She met nuns in an hermitage who gave her simple instructions for curing a cold: let the body heal. They know it will take 10 days, so they allow the body good food and rest during that time. She spent time in a culture called Haenyeo in Korea, where the women free-dive without equipment well into their 80s, holding their breath for three minutes at a time.

“I started having aha moments — it’s all about prevention and it’s not as hard as you think,” Michelle said. “You are learning all these old ways of living that keep you strong.”

She’s incorporated what she calls a “very casual body of knowledge” that the general population in Asia lives by into her own daily routines — such as taking ginger for gut issues, or hot and cold baths for inflammation, or walking outside for stress relief. She still does weighted yoga to break a sweat, but tries to walk every day. (She is also now on the board of a sustainable fashion company and GrowNYC.)

“I am trying to translate this ancient wisdom to how we live here in a modern city,” she said. “What they do in Asia is really preventative care. I grew up with that in my Korean culture but had forgotten about it. I think if we embraced modern medicine along with the old ways of eating we could solve a lot of problems.”