Internationalised email subjects

[bugmagnet at gmail.com]

I am writing a simple email program in Python that will send out
emails containing Chinese characters in the message subject and body.
I am not having any trouble getting the email body displayed correctly
in Chinese inside the email client, however the email subject and
sender name (which are also in Chinese) are garbled and are not
displayed correctly in the email client.

Here is the code snippet:

writer = MimeWriter.MimeWriter(out)
headers = {"From": senderName + ' <' + senderName + '>', "To":
recipientEmail, "Reply-to": senderEmail}

writer.addheader("Subject", subject)
writer.addheader("MIME-Version", "1.0")
writer.addheader('From', headers['From'])
writer.addheader('To', headers['To'])
writer.addheader('Reply-to', headers['Reply-to'])

I'm quite new to Python (and programming in general) and am having a
hard time wrapping my head around the internationalization functions
of Python, so was hoping someone could point me in the right
direction.  Is there a different method I need to use in order for
the  sender name and subject to be displayed correctly?  Is there an
extra step I am missing?  Some sample code would be very helpful.

Thanks!