custom collation?

Hey NG-
I'm trying to order a column such that it's in order by pinyin, hence
an ORDER BY clause would change this:

ma
m=E0
m=E1
ma
ma

into this:

ma
m=E1
ma
m=E0
ma

I'm using UTF-8, and I've tried switching the collation on the column
to various UTF-8 collations and GBK and Big5, but no dice. ORDER BY
either doesn't order at all or orders by binary, which is also wrong.
I think what I need is a custom collation, and a very simple one at
that. It's basically the english alphabet plus 20 or so characters, in
UTF-8, case insensitive.

I have searched for "custom collation" to no avail, any pointers?
Thanks,

Jacob