Structure for deep nests in mongoose - node.js

Question

Mongo noob here. I'm building a mongoose schema with a lot of one-to-many relationships, and this seems to be a good opportunity to use nesting. I have a collection "countries", each has many "states", each has many "cities", each has many "people." I'm going to want to run all different sorts of queries...get states by country, insert new city into state, remove a person from a city, etc.
How do I structure it? My current schema looks like this:
var mongoose = require('mongoose')
, Schema = mongoose.Schema
;
var countrySchema = Schema({
name: { type: String },
states: [ {
name: { type: String },
cities: [ {
name: { type: String },
people: [ {
name: { type: String }
} ]
} ]
} ]
});
To me, that makes sense. I will likely be pulling entities based on deep nests, so this kind of nested schema should give me the performance edge that a heavily-joined relational database won't (right?).
It is, however, very ugly. I have also seen this style of schema construction:
var mongoose = require('mongoose')
, Schema = mongoose.Schema
, ObjectId = Schema.ObjectId
;
var countrySchema = mongoose.schema({
name: { type: String },
states: [ { type: ObjectId, ref: State } ]
});
var stateSchema = mongoose.schema({
name: { type: String },
cities: [ { type: ObjectId, ref: City } ]
});
var citySchema = mongoose.schema({
name: { type: String },
persons: [ { type: ObjectId, ref: Person } ]
});
var personSchema = mongoose.schema({
name: { type: String },
});
var Country = mongoose.model('Country', countrySchema)
, State = mongoose.model('State', stateSchema)
, City = mongoose.model('City', citySchema)
, Person = mongoose.model('Person', personSchema)
;
Is this a better way to do it? It seems more readable, but I imagine it doesn't perform as well.